Roundup 9/23

It's been a long couple of days for me on a personal level (12+ hour days aren't easy), but that's not going to stop me from bringing you the most relevant movie news of yesterday and today. Onward...

• I'll lead off with forehead-slapping news: Universal is quickly losing my respect and their latest offense comes in the form of greenlighting a live-action Barbie movie. If what I know of Barbie is true, then this movie is going to be awesome - she seems to be a shape-shifting organism who has the ability to perform nearly any job, AND she has an outlandish number of vehicles at her disposal. Sounds like your standard superhero movie to me. On a serious note, it's gotta totally mess with your mind if you're the actress who gets the lead role. How can anyone live up to those plastic standards?

• Columbia Pictures is officially moving forward with Ghost Rider 2 (with Nic Cage probably reprising his iconic role) and reboots of Daredevil and Silver Surfer films as well. Sure, Silver Surfer never had a proper movie of his own, but his introduction in Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer was close enough and will most likely be completely retconned since Fox is rebooting Fantastic Four anyway. Jason Statham has expressed interest in playing Daredevil, and although I doubt that will happen, I'd still like to see it.

• More Columbia Pictures news - the company is interested in buying the rights to a live-action He-Man: Masters of the Universe movie. Screenwriter Justin Marks recently wrote a script for this film that seemed to garner fanboy approval (I wouldn't know: I refuse to read scripts that leak online - it ruins all the surprises in the actual movie!). Unfortunately for those excited for Marks' take, his version has been scrapped by Warner Bros. and Columbia is going to start from scratch if they end up scoring the rights to the property. I've seen Masters of the Universe already - the classic 1987 Dolph Lundgren Version - and that's all I need to see.

• I previously told you that DJ Caruso, director of Eagle Eye and Disturbia, was set to direct a movie called Jack the Giant Killer. This film is a live action adult take on the Jack and the Beanstalk legend. It appears that his deal has fallen through, and Bryan Singer (X-Men 1 and 2) has stepped up to take the reins. Singer's involvement is out of left field, since he's so freakin' busy right now doing EVERYTHING BUT what we all want to see, which is of course his version of The Man of Steel. I still quasi-like the concept of this story, but as I mentioned before, it sounds a little too close to the Fables TV series that ABC is supposedly creating as I type. (When is THAT coming out? That's what I really want to see.)

• And finally, the cast for The Other Guys (formerly titled The B Team) is quickly approaching fantastic. In Adam McKay's (Anchorman, Talladega Nights) latest directorial effort, Will Ferrell and Mark Wahlberg play New York City cops who, for once, aren't the center of attention. They are the guys in the background, the normal cops, and they watch supercops (played by Samuel L. Jackson and Dwayne Johnson) take all the badass cases and get all the ladies. Eva Mendes, Michael Keaton, and funnyman Steve Coogan fill out the rest of the cast so far, with Coogan playing the villain. It reminds me of Mystery Men, except this will hopefully be funny. The Other Guys sounds stupendous - I've always talked about making a movie very similar to this, except mine was going to be about a citizen in a town of supercops whose car gets blown up as collateral damage.