The big question is when Pirates 5 will get underway. Last week, the website /Film reported that filming is scheduled to begin in Puerto Rico this November, with both Johnny Depp and On Stranger Tides director Rob Marshall back in action. However, Moviehole soon rebutted the rumor, with their source saying a script hasn’t even been written. At the same time, that source teased the return of a major character for part 5.

Regardless of whether either of these rumors are true, we expect it’s only a matter of time before Disney officially confirms the next sequel. But what can they do to…

Sony Pictures Animation has just landed the movie rights to Manimal, based on the 1980s television series about a wealthy doctor with the power to transform into animals in order to fight crime.

Do studios really need to be told this is a bad idea? Seriously? I don’t know how anyone might possibly think this is a good idea.

Here’s the show opener from the 1983 show.

Well it seems today is a day for me to post about independent films.

Here’s one I came across that looks pretty interesting. Here’s the synopsis from the Apple Trailers page:

An 11-year-old boy gets a crash course in what it means to be a man when he spends a day with the uncle he idolizes in LUV, a poignant and gritty coming-of-age story featuring standout performances by Common, Danny Glover, Dennis Haysbert, Charles S. Dutton and newcomer Michael Rainey Jr. With his mother in rehab and his father out of the picture, young Woody Watson (Michael Rainey Jr.) lives with his grandmother…

I don’t know much about the film The Conspiracy at this point, other than the fact that it is playing at Fantastic Fest. That implies a few things about the film that features a documentary crew that is covering the theories of one seeming conspiracy crackpot. But that “crackpots” disappears, the crew starts to think there might be more to the theories than they’d initially imagined.

While this trailer features some histrionics that are a little difficult to swallow out of context, there are also some very effective, unsettling scenes here. Writer/director Christopher MacBride seems to…

Peter Jackson took to the interwebs to usher in Tolkien Week - currently underway, natch - announcing a new trailer for December’s The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey that will drop Wednesday the 19th. (Mark your calendars, wizards!) And for good measure, USA Today debuted a new batch of exclusive Hobbit pics for your viewing pleasure. Gollum is ready for his close-up.

Click right here or on Gandalf’s wise old mug for over a dozen images from The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey, in theaters (and 3-D and IMAX) on December 14.

If you weren’t looking forward to Looper, perhaps I can help with that. I mean, you would be crazy because who doesn’t want to see a film with Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Bruce Willis?

But just in case you weren’t looking forward to it, here’s a behind the scenes featurette. My favorite part is Joseph Gordon-Levitt saying, “Of course he gets the better of me, he’s Bruce Willis.”

It’s hard not to get my expectations up, though I typically like a film better when I don’t. But I am greatly looking forward to this one.

Bones, Season 8 Premiers tonight on Fox at 8/7c. Since I am a cable cutter I will have to wait for it to become available online. I will likely get a season pass in iTunes, then I’ll be able to let you know what I think of the season premier.

I’m still waiting for a network or even just a specific TV show to be available instantly on demand. Seems like it would be the next logical step in TV delivery. My hopes are not high that the networks and studios are interested in working with the evolving technology however. So I’m sure that I’ll simply have to wait a day for it to become available…

I’m reluctant to say that this is absolutely 100% the design for the new RoboCop, despite the fact that these pictures were snapped on the Toronto set of Jose Padilha‘s new version of the story. I say that because I’m not certain that we’re seeing Joel Kinnamanin the suit there, though it could be a stuntman in a version of the suit that Kinnaman wears.

Still, these are pics of a suit from the set of the new RoboCop, and so, combined with what we’ve seen of the new ED209, they give us some idea of what this movie is going to look like. Check out full-size shots below.

I was a kid when…

Making his first press appearance since that headline-grabbing Republican National Convention speech, Clint Eastwood laughed off his rambling, off-the-cuff missive to an invisible Obama. “It didn’t get the response I wanted,” joked the 82 year-old actor and filmmaker at a press conference for his upcoming baseball flick Trouble With The Curve, “because I was hoping they’d nominate me.”

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Eastwood explained what he’d been trying to convey when he improvised an exchange with an empty chair on the RNC stage: “My only message was [that] I wanted people to take the idolizing factor out…