Today, the news broke that Disney has bought Marvel Entertainment, lock stock and barrel, for $4 billion. That includes Marvel Comics, with over 5,000 characters, and Marvel Studios, with the successful Iron Man and Hulk film franchises, plus the upcoming Thor, Captain America and The Avengers. It seems like it's a win-win scenario -- Disney gets a boys' brand to bookend the Disney Princesses, and Marvel gets some global multimedia clout -- but what does this really mean for our beloved Marvel superheroes? As fans, these are just a few things we're worried and/or excited about.
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With the sequel to Rob Zombie's remake of Halloween in theaters, the director has decided it's the perfect time to announce that he will next remake The Blob, the 1958 movie about a... well, a blob. From space. It's already been remade, in 1988 with Johnny Drama from Entourage, but we'll ignore that one if it means we'll get a grisly new sci-fi story from Mr. Zombie. Of course, Zombie doesn't have a monopoly on remaking old horror movies, and there are already a slew of re-imaginings in the works. We rounded up info on a few of the more high-profile ones, so you know which movies are currently getting hacked to bits in the editing room and which are just plain dead.
There is a part of us that is vaguely interested in the movie Taking Woodstock, since we love Demitri Martin on his show Important Things, and the supporting cast (Emile Hirsch, Eugene Levy, Liev Schreiber cross-dressing again -- remember Mixed Nuts?) is impressive. But while the concert at Woodstock was certainly an exciting event, haven't there been enough movies about it? And is Ang Lee really the director to tackle the subject matter? Because when given exciting material, Lee has a tendency to turn it into a snooze-fest. 
The best comedy of the year -- I Love You, Man -- is finally out on DVD, which means you can watch it again and again and again. And believe us, you'll want to.
The world lost a great filmmaker this week, as legendary screenwriter and director John Hughes passed away. Not only did the man write and direct many of the 1980s' greatest, funniest films -- Sixteen Candles, The Breakfast Club, Ferris Bueller's Day Off -- he wrote the screenplays for dozens more, including Pretty in Pink, Home Alone and the first three Vacation movies. We went through his body of work to pull out some of the funniest lines that we still quote to this day.
Julie & Julia is going to be great, not only because the effervescent Amy Adams is in it, but also because Meryl Streep somehow found a way to do a Julia Child impression that wasn't embarrassing. This is unprecedented. Which got me thinking about some of my favorite celebrity impersonations in film (not necessarily biopics, which are by and large the worst), and decided to put together a list of them. Which means it's ground-rules time. 
They recently announced that they were replacing relative unknown Rachelle Lefevre with Bryce Dallas Howard for the third Twilight movie (the second is due out in the fall) due to a "scheduling conflict." What possible "conflict" could a young actor have that they couldn't be in this megahit series? Sounds like Lefevre got shown the door because her villainess Victoria wasn't evil enough. But we'd love it if more of these people suddenly had conflicts, and they suddenly had to recast most of the roles in the film with some big-name actors. It might make us a whole lot more excited for the Eclipse.
Fans of the classic children's book Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH were treated to animated version in 1982, retitled The Secret of NIMH. Except in the movie, there were some significant changes, like the addition of magic and mysticism, and a lot more deaths. Well, that may be rectified, since a new film adaptation of the book is in the works, one that will likely be a combination of live-action and computer-generated animation. If that had been an option back in 1982, they probably would have just done that the first time, as they would have with every other talking-animal movie made in that decade. We made a list of the animated classics that need an updated go-around, either because they didn't do the book justice or because a new version would make them that much cooler.
500 Days of Summer is one of those movies that starts out so promising and subversive, but just wimps out along the way and ends up reinforcing all the old romantic comedy clichés we've grown tired of. A shame, too, because it could have been so much better, and the cast deserved a script worthy of them, but hey, I know better than to expect anything new from these movies, especially one that was so ubiquitous and relentlessly advertised. 
The Smurfs live-action movie is officially underway, and we can't wait to see what actors are going to be in it! For Vanity Smurf, they need someone who's pretty, but not too pretty, so that-- what? The Smurfs will all be computer-generated? But... but we just wrote this whole big Smurf cast wish list! Oh, come on! Well, maybe they'll change their minds, and realize that tiny, blue versions of some of today's funniest actors is the way to go.
After two years of waiting, I have finally seen the latest installment in the Harry Potter series, and it is good. I mean, really good. I laughed, I cried, I was on the edge of my seat. And considering that it was only rated PG, rather than PG-13 like the last two, there was still plenty of gore and violence and scary stuff. There's also a lot of snogging (British for making out), because, in case you weren't aware, this chapter of the Potter saga is all about sex.