Mattel has found a starring role for Barbie, setting up a live action comedy at Sony Pictures that the toymaker will produce with Walter Parkes and Laurie MacDonald.

The studio plans to start lensing the film by the end of the year, using a script written by Jenny Bicks (she wrote for and executive produced Showtime’s “The Big C,” and co-wrote “Rio 2″).

Universal Pictures had planned to produce a film around the popular doll in 2009, with producerLaurence Mark.

Naturally, Sony sees Barbie as a potential new franchise for the studio.

DO. NOT. WANT!

Amazon and HBO have signed an extensive, multi-year agreement that will bring many of the premium channel’s greatest shows including The Sopranos, Six Feet Under, and The Wire to Amazon Prime Instant Video. The deal also includes “early” seasons of Boardwalk Empire and True Blood. Newer shows like Girls, The Newsroom and Veep will eventually be made available to Prime subscribers, but not until three years after they’ve first aired on HBO. And other hits like Game of Thrones aren’t even mentioned as part of the deal, so HBO may be holding at least some popular content away from Amazon’s…

“We actually don’t even have the completed budget yet. But it will be in that range. These large, tentpole kinds of movies, on the expensive side, are in the neighborhood of $175-200 million, that kind of a number — some are more, some are less,” Horn shared. “We need to give the audience, essentially, a full meal in return for their affection and devotion and love for these properties.”

And who better to ensure that the audience gets what it wants/deserves than George Lucas? Even though he soldLucasfilm to Disney for billions and has said repeatedly he’s retired, Horn reveals he’s still…

Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman, the screenwriting and producing duo who have worked on some of Hollywood’s biggest franchises(Mission:Impossible, Transformers, Star Trek,the upcoming Amazing Spider-Man 2) have decided to end their feature film partnership so they can both pursue directing careers.  Their company, K/O Paper Products, will not dissolve, however.  The two are will continue to collaborate on various television projects, both current and upcoming.

Kurtzman is already set to direct “Venom”, a spinoff of the Spider-Man franchise.  Orci’s directorial ambitions will be of great…

Until X-Men: Days of Future Past opens, we won’t know who survives and what shape they’re in. But there’s no question that Fox will be making more X-Men movies to follow it, starting with X-Men: Apocalypse. But what about the classic cast — is this year’s film their swan song, with the exception of Hugh Jackman? That’s seemed likely, given past statements from Singer such as “[Apocalypse will]  introduce familiar characters in a younger time,” and the general sense that Apocalypse is a sequel to First Class.

...

[Apocalypse] really follows the ‘First Class’ cast. Meaning it is a sequel…

In an interview with Crave Online, X-Men: Days of Future Past writer and producer Simon Kinberg was asked to clear things up in regards to Anna Paquin’s role in the “inbetweenquel”. Fans were disappointed to learn that the actress had been cut from the movie, although the backlash seemingly led to at least a small part of what was once a significant chunk of screentime being restored. “I just wanted to see Ian [McKellan] and Patrick [Stewart] on a mission together. So I took them away from the main plot of the movie so that they could go off and do something, and [Rogue] was the MacGuffin of…

DreamWorks has released the first five minutes of How to Train Your Dragon 2 and I have to say, it’s pretty awesome. I have recently sat myself down and watched the first How To Train Your Dragon film and it was amazing. This makes me very hopeful for the second installation in this franchise. I’m liking what I see so far. And the world has so utterly changed from what was going on in the first film that it will be interesting to see where they go with the story.

Captain America: The Winter Soldier’s musical score is just flat-out bad. I’m sure you could justify the thought process behind its design, but there’s nothing original about it, and most of the cues range from boring to — literally — physically uncomfortable.

The carry-over from the last movie, or even from The Avengers, was minimal. Cap’s theme was conspicuously absent, and one would think that Falcon, S.H.I.E.L.D., Black Widow, or SOMEBODY present in the movie deserved a recognizable motif or musical signature.

Admittedly, I noticed a vague attempt at giving the Winter Soldier himself a…

Disney is having a good year. Thanks to the insane success of “Frozen” and their Marvel studios wing, the studio has already crossed the $1 billion mark for 2014 and it’s not even May. Part of that success is thanks to “Captain America: The Winter Soldier,” which spent its third week at the #1 box-office spot. Crossing the $200 million mark domestically, the film added another $26.6 million to its domestic tally (only down 36% from the previous weekend) and banked another $35.3 million overseas for $586 million total worldwide. Could it be one of Marvel’s highest grossing films ever? Maybe,…