” ‘Star Trek’ softened up the entertainment arena so that ‘Star Wars’ could come along and stand on its shoulders,” Lucas said in an interview featured on the DVD. “There was an effective group of people in the beginning who accepted it.. that it wasn’t that far out. For the studios it was way far out, [they said] ‘What is this?’, but there was a fanbase out there—primarily the ‘Star Trek’ fanbase—who understood sci-fi, understood visual sci-fi, and was ready for something like this ‘Star Wars’ to be in the feature arena.”

And as JoBlo rightly acknowledges, it was actually the success of…

So, in the last clip I posted from the upcoming The Wolverine, I mentioned I didn’t like it and it was a bad sign for the film because the action was not followable and the it was all just shaky cam bad choreography non-sense. Maybe I judged a little too harshly in thinking that the whole film would be like that because I liked the action in this clip far better. This action was well choreographed and much easier to follow.

Of course the real question I have right now: is there a good story here? Obviously the clips and trailers are focusing pretty heavy on the action, but just action…

The dates for the U.S. home video release of JJ Abrams’ Star Trek Into Darkness have been announced. It comes earlier than expected. Paramount is also trying something other studios have been toying with in the last year or so by offering an earlier release date of August 20, 2013 for the digital download version, compared to the physical disc releases that come a few weeks later on September 10 , 2013.

Awesome! I will, of course, be downloading this via iTunes the instant this becomes available! And I love that they are doing the digital release first.

Also, here’s a clip from Yahoo!…

The very end of the super-duper 2004 special edition of Return of the Jedi finds Luke gazing out to see Obi-Wan smiling, Yoda smiling, Anakin smiling,and the audience freaking out. Instead of Sebastian Shaw as an old Anakin, Hayden Christensen suddenly shimmered into view, smirking awkwardly, complete with his big Jedi mullet. And the haters began to hate. But, now with Episode VII in full development, complete with casting calls, there’s paradoxically one person I don’t think they can leave out, and that person is Hayden Christensen! Here’s why the ghost of Hayden must…

Read The Rest

The argument of this ranked list of Guillermo del Toro’s films is that he excels as a pop artist and falters whenever he becomes self-consciously serious. Del Toro’s work is linked by deep-geek genre immersion that makes him a skilled tinkerer with fantasy and horror tropes filtered through a color palette heavy on saturated blues and reds and loads of Catholic imagery attesting to a childhood living with an zealously pious grandmother.

This article is an interesting read, particularly as someone who has not seen any del Toro films before. But of particular note here is that 8^th (worst)…

So here we go with “The Jungle Book,” as THR reports Disney has hired Justin Marks, who penned an early draft of the studio’s “20,000 Leagues Under The Sea” reboot, to write the script. Hooray! Listen, it’s just the bare, franchise necessities which is why this is happening, though since Rudyard Kipling‘s stories are in the public domain it means they have competition from Warner Bros. who have their own Mowgli feature brewing, penned by “Harry Potter” dude Steve Kloves.

Hmm. I’m not sure how much I care about this. Of course the headline caught my eye because I’ve only watched the…

Today we’ll be broadcasting The MovieByte Podcast live at 4:00 PM Central Daylight Time. Chad Hopkins will be back to discuss all the goodies and films with me this week as he was last week.

Also joining us this week for the first time is Mikey Fissel of Reel World Theology. We’ll be discussing Despicable Me 2 and he’s seen it and has some opinions on it. We’ll also talk about The Lone Ranger as well as the latest in movie news and trailers, as always. And we’d love for you to join us for the live broadcast and interact with us! So join us at 4:00 PM! Watch for it!

Another appetite wheter has made an appearance for Agents of SHIELD, and let me tell you, it’s very “Joss Whedon-y”. Consider this bit of dialog from the promo (embeded below):

“What does SHIELD” stand for Agent Ward?”

“Strategic Homeland Intervention Enforcement and Logistics Division.”

“And what does that mean to you?”

“It means someone really wanted our intials to spell out SHIELD.”

That is Joss Whedon dialog if I’ve ever heard it, and that makes me very happy. Many people may not quite get the whole Buffy and Angel phenomenon, but that type of writing is why we loved those…

This is by no means a compressive list, indeed I only have two titles here for you. Someday when I have more time, or MovieByte is a bigger deal and has more writers, and I can dedicate a writer to keep an eye on new streaming titles, I’d like to do a feature every week highlighting new titles available for streaming and download. But for now, I just wanted to highlight these two titles that I noticed. If you can’t or don’t want to make it out to the cinema this week/weekend, one of these two titles might be a fun one to catch.

The Host

iTunes | Amazon Instant

This is an extremely…