A picture of The Lizard from the upcoming The Amazing Spider-Man film has been revealed on a toy, and … I’m not too thrilled.

While no official picture of The Lizard has been released, tie-in products have been showing up here and there that give us a glimpse, and the best yet comes from an upcoming remote control for a toy.  You can ignore the red dot on his head as that is a power indicator, but this is the best face-on image we’ve seen as of yet.  (You can click on it for a larger view.)

While not horrible, I am a real traditionalist when it comes to this character, and this is pretty much nothing like he appears in the comic books.  Here’s one rendition of him from the books.

I’ve always preferred the more feral, animalistic version of the character, and it looks to me like he’s going to be too much of just a giant brute in the film.  If you’re going to do this character, at least do him right.  You teased us with him in the last three films, we finally get him, and this is what you do with him?

… I really hate Hollywood some days.

[via Idle Hands]

It’s episode #173 and Scattercast is ready for the new year.

Some thoughts on the end of 2011, and the beginning of 2012.

A bunch of useless rambling.

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Yes, I’m still working on this silly embedding issue.

Is no one working this week?

Between my professional writing and what I do here, it feels like I’m the only one churning out any content.  (Well, not true, the rest of the staff at TechnoBuffalo is right there with me)  I mean, I understand we have two holiday weekends in a row, but does that mean no one can be bothered to make any news?  Heck, most of the sites I look at for television and movie news are either completely shut down or running a skeleton crew.  I’m sorry, but I know how blogging works, and you need fresh content to keep the eyeballs coming back, and that just makes no sense to me to just shut down completely.

Even those that are running, the majority of them are on auto-pilot with “best of this …” and “best of that …” stories running.  Heck, I saw one site today running a best of each month of the year.  Don’t you think that is stretching things a bit, folks?

Meanwhile, I shall carry on, bringing you pointless posts about … something.  Hopefully the world will return to normal next week, or at least I hope it will.  Meanwhile … everyone back to work!

The National Film Preservation Board has made their annual announcement of which films are being added to The National Film Registry.

For those unfamiliar with the project, each year up to 25 films are selected for preservation in the Library of Congress.  Each film must be at least 10-years-old, they do not have to be feature length, and they do not have to have received a theatrical release.

This year’s list includes:

1. Allures (1961)
2. Bambi (1942)
3. The Big Heat (1953)
4. A Computer Animated Hand (1972)
5. Crisis: Behind a Presidential Commitment (1963)
6. The Cry of the Children (1912)
7. A Cure for Pokeritis (1912)
8. El Mariachi (1992)
9. Faces (1968)
10. Fake Fruit Factory (1986)
11. Forrest Gump (1994)
12. Growing Up Female (1971)
13. Hester Street (1975)
14. I, an Actress (1977)
15. The Iron Horse (1924)
16. The Kid (1921)
17. The Lost Weekend (1945)
18. The Negro Soldier (1944)
19. Nicholas Brothers Family Home Movies (1930s-1940s)
20. Norma Rae (1979)
21. Porgy and Bess (1959)
22. The Silence of the Lambs (1991)
23. Stand and Deliver (1988)
24. Twentieth Century (1934)
25. War of the Worlds (1953)

As with each year there are a lot of early movies on here I have never heard of, but the real stand outs this year are Bambi (how was this not already on there?), The Kid, The Silence of the Lambs and War of the Worlds.  As much as I love El Mariachi, I’m not quite sure why it’s on here as it was a Mexican production, but oh well.  Almost every year there is one or two that I feel don’t fit with the charter for the National Film Preservation Board which says eligible films have to be “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant films” to be included in the registry.  However, this year? I think I agree with all of them.  This really is a stellar lineup of films.

Any movies on the list that confuse you?

You can send in up to 50 films for the 2012 list, get to it folks!

You can also check out the additions for 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009 and 2010.

It appears that moviegoers were quite anxious to get out to the theaters as the four day numbers saw some films shift position and others jump a significant amount.

Mission:Impossible – Ghost Protocol saw a huge Monday, bringing its weekend total for the four days from the $26.5 million we saw to a whopping $46.2 million total.  It’s still trailing as the slowest film in the series, but seeing as the other three all released in May going into the summer film season, this isn’t too surprising.

Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows jumped up by $14 million to $31.8 million, and still puts it well behind the original, but is finally getting it out of the area of “total disaster.”

Third place went to Alvin and the Chipmunks: Chipwrecked which brought in another $7 million on Monday bringing its four day total to $20 million. Still not enough to help this film get totally out of the basement, it has next to no hope now of breaking $200 million like the first two in the series did.

Speaking of films that won’t break $200 million, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo moved up to $19.4 million with Monday in the mix, and it is now pretty much doomed to failure.  With a $90 million budget it would need to hit $180 million domestic to be considered profitable, and there is just no way it’s going to do that.  The film may do better internationally, but the costs of foreign distribution are much higher.  Things don’t look too good here as of yet.

Considering how unknown Tin Tin is in the United States, the fact The Adventures of Tin Tin brought in $16 million for the four day weekend is pretty impressive.

Other new films out this weekend saw We Bought a Zoo came in sixth with $15.6 million. Possibly the most impressive debut this weekend was Spielberg’s other film, War Horse, which opened on Christmas Day and brought in just over $15 million in two days. Not too bad and it will be interesting to see how it does in the coming days. The Darkest Hour, a new horror movie, opened up with $5.5 million, because, you know, it’s always wise to open a horror film at Christmas time.

The holiday weekend wasn’t good to the box office, but that seems to go with the flow for this year for movies.

Mission:Impossible – Ghost Protocol finally hit wide release this weekend, and brought in a healthy $26.5 million, but more than likely was a lower number than the studio was looking for.  It’s domestic total stands at $58.9 million off of a $145 million budget, so it’ll be interesting to see how this one ends up doing.

Coming in second was Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows with $17.8 million, a 55 percent fall from last weekend, and leaves the film well behind the original at the same point in release. Yes, it’s at a little over $76 million now, but the first film was at a $138 million. It looks like people were definitely not that ready for a second adventure of the famous detective with an updated take.

Alvin and the Chipmunks: Chipwrecked held on fairly well with a 44 percent drop, and while it’s still trailing the first two films, that’s a respectable hold for the third movie in the series. It brought in $13.3 million, which is about $13 million more than I think it should have brought in.

Coming in fourth was the second adaptation of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo with $13 million. It opened early in the week and has brought in a total of $21.4 million, but seeing as it had a $90 million budget, things aren’t looking good for this movie to make its money back.

Rounding out the top five was The Adventures of Tin Tin with an even $13 million, bringing its domestic total to $17.1 million, but this is in addition to the $239.1 million its brought in worldwide since it was released two months ago. This isn’t surprising as Tin Tin is not that well-known character in the United States.

This closes out the big releases for 2011 in the United States, so I wouldn’t expect things to change much next weekend.

Thor 2 has picked up a new director in the form of someone who is best known for their TV work.

Marvel has announced that it has picked up Alan Taylor as the new director for the Thor sequel.  Taylor is best known for his work on Game of Thrones, Boardwalk Empire and Nurse Jackie, and directed the feature Palookaville.

The quick replacement of Patty Jenkins, who left the film earlier this month, means that the film can stay on track for its November 15, 2013 release date.  Apparently the comic company/movie studio was looking at multiple directors from the Game of Thrones series, and all one can figure is that they saw it as a similar style.

I guess what we’re learned here is being a director on a Marvel movie is a plug-and-play type situation.

[via Deadline]

Supposedly Prometheus, the upcoming film from Ridley Scott, doesn’t have that much to do with his 1979 classic Alien, if anything at all. I have to say I disagree.

What started off as a prequel to Alien supposedly changed over time in to a completely different project, that maybe shared some “DNA” with the 1979 sci-fi classic, but not much.  When the trailer came out earlier this week I think I have to call “BS” on these comments.  Ladies and gentlemen, I give you evidence marked as “A” … for Alien.

We’ll ignore the very similar image styles between the two films because this is the same director after all, but the bottom image comes from the 44 second mark in the trailer embedded below, and it’s hard to mistake the iconic “Space Jockey” chair coming out of the floor in this shot.  Also of note, see the man under the “S” on the far right side of the screen? Look at his height compared to the chair, and the height of the humans next to the Space Jockey in the shot from Alien.  I’m fairly confident the guy in the new shot is the actual jockey.

How they can say this movie only shares some “DNA” with Alein when you have one of the most iconic set pieces in sci-fi film history showing up is beyond me, but who cares, I’m seeing this no matter what.

It’s episode #172 and Scattercast is ready for the holidays.

Some thoughts on the stupidity of Internet commenters.

Lots of great movie trailers coming out as of late.

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Yes, I’m still working on this silly embedding issue.

Break out the shiny cars, it appears the sixth and seventh The Fast & the Furious films are being scripted at the same time.

After Fast Five went on to be the highest grossing film in the franchise yet, it was no surprise that Fast Six was greenlit, and there was already talk of a seventh film to follow.  Now Vin Diesel has confirmed that the two films are being scripted at the same time.  Speaking with The Hollywood Reporter, the action star said, “With the success of this last one, and the inclusion of so many characters, and the broadening of scope, when we were sitting down to figure out what would fit into the real estate of number six, we didn’t have enough space.” He went on to add, “We have to pay off this story, we have to service all of these character relationships, and when we started mapping all that out it just went beyond 110 pages. The studio said, ‘You can’t fit all that story in one damn movie!’”

I’m sorry, but did I miss something when this series of movies became so deep that they didn’t have “enough space” for all of their plotlines?  This has nothing to do with servicing a story, this has to do with the fact that the fifth film in a series became the highest grossing one yet and brought in over $626 million worldwide off of a $125 million dollar budget.  Working on the next two at the same time lowers costs even further, potentially putting each installment possibly in the $110 million range.

Paul Walker, one of the stars of the series, added, “It’s not about the action and the cars, which initially appealed to me when I was 25-years-old,  Because if that’s all it was, it would have fallen off a long time ago.”  I hate to break it to him, but it’s been 10 years since the first film, that’s exactly what it’s still about.  You’ve got a new generation of kids coming to see these movies for the cars, and somehow I doubt they’re showing up for the “plot.”

The trailer for the first Hobbit movie, The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey, has hit despite the fact it isn’t due to hit theaters for a year.

I was not a fan of The Lord of the Rings series.  The books, yes, the movies, not so much.  I have never seen people freak out so hard over a trilogy of films that I felt really did somewhat of a disservice to their source material.  Aren’t we as geeks supposed to go irate when the source material gets messed with?  Apparently it’s okay if Peter Jackson is involved.  Well, get ready for it to happen again because The Hobbit is being split into two movies because … well, lets be blunt, it’s going to mean that much more money.

Either way, heres the trailer for the first film.

It seems that if the people behind the James Bond franchise have their way, Daniel Craig will set the record for the most turns in the role of the famous spy.

Speaking with People.co.uk, Bond producer Michael G Wilson, one of the producers behind 13 of the films, has made it very clear that they are happy with Craig in the lead role.  How happy?  How about trying to sign him to five more films, making him the longest running actor in the part?  Well, that appears to be what may be happening.  When Wilson was asked about the fact Skyfall fulfills Craig’s current contract of three films, he said, “It’s certainly something we’ll be ­discussing with him once we finish shooting Skyfall. [...] A lot of people have said Daniel’s been their favourite Bond since Sean Connery and I can’t argue with them. He’s doing a great job.”

If Craig was to agree to this deal, he would surpass Roger Moore as the actor to play this part for the highest number of films.  (Moore appeared in seven.)  “Daniel’s been a terrific Bond, a superb actor and a ­terrific man. The fans love him and I don’t think there’s a better actor to play the part,” said Wilson.  “Filming has gone very well so far and I’d love Daniel to surpass Roger’s record and do eight pictures,” Wilson added.  Will he make folks behind the camera happy if he sticks around that long?  ”Daniel’s been an absolute pleasure to be around because he takes the role so seriously. There’s really no one more passionate about making these films work than him – he’s a film maker’s dream.”

To be honest, I think Craig is the most exciting thing to happen to the Bond series in a long, long time, so the idea of him hanging around for five more films is absolutely fine with me.  Craig is currently 43-years-old, so we’re looking at 10 or more years of him working on this series, and that may get a little rough on him; if he thinks he’d be up for it, why not go for it and make a lot fans happy?

Skyfall hits theaters next November, but hopefully there will be a decision announced before then that he is staying with the series and continuing to kick ass the way Bond should.