Jay Rasulo said keeping costs lower will help with risk management

Walt Disney will be more judicious when it comes to greenlighting the next big-budget film that doesn’t feature a member of the Marvel Comics or Star Wars universe.

Chief Financial Officer Jay Rasulo said the studio had learned a valuable lesson from the failure of “The Lone Ranger.” The Johnny Depp Western cost a reported $215 million to produce and tens of millions more to market, but only netted $243 million worldwide.

“There needs to be a cap on tentpole, non-franchise movies,” Rasulo said at the Bank of America…

Insidious: adjective, proceeding in a gradual, subtle way, but with harmful effects.

That just about sums up this film if you ask me. You see, I can’t help but form opinions about films even if I haven’t seen them (I’m sure you’ve noticed). I have no intention of seeing Insidious Chapter 2. It looks dreadful. That may be partly because I’m not exactly into horror films. But there have been a few here and there that I have liked. The Sixth Sense for instance is considered a horror film. But these days I think Horror films have morphed into something else. And generally, there’s a…

One of the better things about Star Trek Into Darkness was that Chris Pine’s Kirk and Alice Eve’s Carol Marcus had good chemistry. And I was glad they didn’t feel the need to be tied to the type of person Carol Marcus was in The Wrath of Khan. Particularly I enjoyed that in this different timeline she was brought up in a way that she acquired an English accent (but that could just be because I love English accents).

In any event, she has a few things she’d like to see for Star Trek and for her character in the next outing.

You have to subscribe to TIME to read my full column (sorry). But you can read this for free: my full Q&A with Whedon, who I sat down with at the Television Critics Association press tour in August, just after critics saw the SHIELD pilot. We talked about the themes I wrote about in my column, as well as the challenges of adapting the franchise, serving the multiple masters of movies and TV (and the interests of Marvel and ABC), and what it means for little guys to live in a world of gods and Hulks. And it went a little like this:

At what point where you persuaded that this material could…

Officially, there’s no director yet, but in this video interview, JJ does not say Rupert won’t direct the next Star Trek film, and the rumor that he will is going around. In fact, JJ does say he’s a talented filmmaker and they’d be lucky to have him.

JJ, for his part, will not be stepping away from Star Trek completely. He will simply be too busy with Star Wars to direct it himself. But he will be involved with and producing the film. As much as I liked Star Trek Into Darkness, I think it would be good to get some fresh blood in the directors chair for the next installment.

There’s no mention of how, or what version of the script this is referring to, so don’t expect everything to be 100% on the mark once the film is released.

Here are the major bullet points revealed:

• There’s a new female lead and foil for Jack Sparrow. She’s suspected of witchcraft, but is actually a scientist.
• Witches are a big part of the movie.
• One of the film’s leads is a ghost, hence the title. He’s a “former member of the British military now sided with Barbossa on a revenge mission.”
• Two new, young, romantic leads – a boy and girl – both from farming families get caught up in…

As the September 24 start date of ABC’s new superhero series Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.looms, we are increasingly worried about our poor ring fingers. Meaning, do we have to type all those periods every time we write the title of this show?

We’re inclined to say no, to be obstinate in the face of authority. We’re looking forward to Joss Whedon’s new series as much as any dweeb, and have dutifully, painstakingly used the extreme punctuation used in all the marketing materials. But increasingly, the thought of writing out that whole ungainly title, periods and all, every time this show…

It’s Friday the 13th so of course we have to get a terrible looking horror film release by way of Insidious. I’m not even going to mention it in my list.

We seem to be in a dearth of good film releases right now.

New This Weeekend

The Family — R

This looks mildly entertaining, but I have this feeling it’s going to be a pretty foul film and I’m going to be disapointed. I do plan to see it sometime soon, but probably not this weekend.

The Manzonis, a notorious mafia family get relocated to Normandy, France under the witness protection program. While they do their best to fit in, old…

I won’t wast too much of your time with my babbling about how great this show is going to be. The awesome is just right below this really short blurb.

Let me just say my favorite line out of all five videos is, “I’m not Hermione, I can’t create instant paralysis with that.”