Ever since the release of the Lord of the Rings trilogy, a conflict has brewed between the author’s estate and Warner Bros., New Line, and Jackson, both over the creative content of the movie and the financial distribution. Years and years of dispute suggest that the future of Middle-earth movies is bleak. 

Like many quarrels in Hollywood, the Tolkien/Warner Bros. spat can be narrowed down to an argument about money. Part of the author’s estate’s contract with the film studio said that a percentage of the profits from any adaptation of Tolkien’s work would go back to them, and it became a…

Remember Gilligan’s Island, the venerable 1960s TV series about seven castaways who wind up stranded on a tropical island after a torrential storm shipwrecks their yacht The S.S. Minnow? Warner Bros is charting a course for a feature film based on the series. It will be fashioned as a star vessel for Book Of Mormon‘s Josh Gad. Gad, Benji Samit and Dan Hernandez will write the script. Lloyd Schwartz, Ross Schwartz, Tracey Silvers and Cathy Silvers will be executive producers. They’re not saying what character Gad would play, but the title character seems a possibility, though he could…

“I found something in the goblin tunnels.”

“What did you find?”

...

“My courage”

“Good, you’ll need it.”

The Hobbit trilogy is, I think, perhaps the ultimate fan fiction for the universe surrounding Middle Earth — that is to say, for The Lord of the Rings. Consider: why would one take a book less than 300 pages and make a trilogy out of it where with The Lord of the Rings trilogy, 3 books of about ~400 pages each were made into 3 films? If the same logic was applied to The Lord of the Rings filmmaking as we’re seeing here with The Hobbit, we’d have 9 films, 3 for each book.

So what has…

“I was cleaning the chimney Aunt May! Honest that’s what I was doing” LOLZ. Come on! Tobey Maquire Spider-Man could come up with better excuses than that on his worst day!

Well, okay maybe he couldn’t but that’s not going to stop me from hating on nuSpidey. This film looks like it’s going to be just as messy, self important, and stupid as the first Amazing Spider-Man. Andrew Garfield is a usurper, that’s all there is to it!

But we might as well get used to the idea of more Amazing Spider-Man because Sony does not seem interested in making a trilogy, or a certain set of films, or whatever.…

Bad movies are like bullies: You know in your heart you should just forget them, turning the other cheek rather than holding a grudge, but the thirst for retribution can be consuming. At The A.V. Club, we prefer to get mad and even, blowing (golden) raspberries at cinema’s annual lowlights. Here, ranked by rankness, are the year’s worst movies—a hall of shame that includes blockbusters, sequels, spinoffs, franchise hopefuls, laughless comedies, and a couple micro-indie stinkers. (Bad movies, after all, come in all shapes, sizes, and budgets.) Don’t have the stomach for such petty score…

In yet another hilarious Honest Trailer video, the guys over at Screen Junkies on YouTube have done it again with their Honest Trailer for the first film in Peter Jackson’s The Hobbit film trilogy, An Unexpected Journey. This is in anticipation of the second film in the trilogy, The Desolation of Smaug, which is set to release in theaters later this week. (I’ll personally be seeing a double-feature showing of both films on Thursday night!)

Both TJ and I have made our opinions on this film quite clear in various episodes of The MovieByte Podcast, but in case you haven’t listened (shame on…

After he failed to develop Beverly Hills Cop as a TV show, last we heard, Eddie Murphy had signed up to star in a fourth BHC movie. According to Deadline, it will be the first project Jerry Bruckheimer will develop under his new deal with Paramount. And it appears that Brett Ratner, who was in talks five years ago to direct, will, in fact, helm the picture, after he wraps Hercules. ”Hercules, Hercules, Hercules, Hercules, Hercules, seriously hurry up with it, Beverly Hills is currently copless,” Murphy responded.

This sounds like so much fail. So much fail. Someone did tell these guys that…

Well, the day is upon us, the day I once again rail on the rebooted Spider-Man franchise. Doggoneit! Why couldn’t they just let this one rest for a little bit? I hated the first installment in this reboot universe so much it’s impossible for me to put it into words. But, many people apparently liked it so a second one is coming to screens. I cannot tell you just how wrong Andrew Garfield seems for this part. I know Toby Maguire takes a lot of flack, but he seemed like the perfect Peter Parker to me. I don’t hate Emma Stone as Gwen Stacy, but that doesn’t make up for anything.

To top off my…

Can you believe it? Yet another franchise sequel has been set for the summer of 2015. This time it’s the as-yet-untitled fifth Bourne film, directed by Justin Lin and starring Jeremy Renner. Universal also dated Luc Besson‘s thriller, Lucy, starring Scarlett Johansson as a trained killer; read more about both below.

At this point it seems like completely suicide to schedule pretty much any film, much less a completely questionable one any time in 2015. I mean it’s getting pretty crowded over there. And I’ll tell you what too, I can’t wait to not see this film. The first installment in the…