The Hollywood Reporter reports that Angryfilms has optioned the Cycler series, which McLaughlin has already adapted as a screenplay, and is currently looking for a director. Cycler tells the story of Jill, an otherwise normal teenager who physically and mentally transforms into a boy named Jack for four days each month. For years, Jill and her parents have kept the secret of her mysterious transformations from the outside world, but one day Jack longs for a life beyond Jill's bedroom and escapes one day.

After the eroticized chastity of the Twilight films, Cylcer could bring us a young adult-targeted film that frankly explores sex and sexuality, not to mention a host of gender issues.

Angryfilms options 'Cycler' books [The Hollywood Reporter via /Film]

Jackson referenced a particular scene, in which a man falls off a cliff to his doom, saying that audiences felt the scene wasn't gruesome enough:

"We got a lot of people telling us that they were disappointed with this death scene, as they wanted to see [the character] in agony and suffer a lot more," said Jackson. "We had to create a whole suffering death scene just to give people the satisfaction they needed."

It sounds like he is talking about the death of George Harvey, who murders Susie Salmon at the beginning of Alice Sebold's book. Many readers have complained that Harvey's death in the book wasn't terribly satisfying, but it sounds like they might have their blood lust sated in the theater.

Peter Jackson: Lovely Bones test audience demanded more violence [Guardian]

Richard Kelly's The Box is based on Richard Matheson's story "Button, Button," which was adapted into an episode of the 1980s run of The Twilight Zone. And this clip, in which James Marsden has a strange encounter with a girl he drives home, feels like something out of The Twilight Zone with its ominous dialogue, methodical pacing, and tense soundtrack:

[via /Film]

Paul Johnson, who calls himself "Otaking," is working on his own Doctor Who anime, a video in which the Third Doctor encounters thugs, the military, and a stereotypical anime babe, and gets caught in a war between the Daleks and the Cybermen.

He's released a couple of brief clips, including this one starring the Daleks:

Here's the most recent segment, which features the Cybermen and shows us a glimpse of the Doctor himself:

He's also posted a video that shows his process from penciling to final product for a scene where the Doctor takes down a few street thugs:

[via Japanator via Topless Robot]

[G4 via Metafilter]

After Marvel pushed back The Avengers' release date by a year, we crossed our fingers, hoping the plan was to fit The Avengers into Favreau's directing schedule. But no such luck. He'll still be onboard as an executive producer, but Favreau says he's simply not available to direct — and it's probably for the best:

"You need somebody who has the perspective of all the different franchises to bring them together. I have the myopic vision of just knowing and loving Iron Man."

He also says that, with his high-tech focus on Iron Man, The Avengers will need a director who is able to integrate the Marvel Universe's more science fiction aspects with the supernatural bits that come with Thor. But in the meantime, it sounds like we'll be seeing elements of the other Avengers movies teased in Iron Man 2.

"We want to reinforce a lot of the stuff we started to tip off," Favreau told MTV News. "'The Avengers' is a much larger concern for Marvel and Kevin Feige, who runs Marvel. They're going to be doing 'Thor' and 'Captain America,' and the way we might start to tease those things in this movie, some of it is stuff that we've discussed [and] some of the stuff you do last-minute as you figure out how that stuff is coming together."

"It's an evolving, amorphous thing," he explained. "If we decide and commit too early, the secret always gets out."

So the question is, who's going to sit in The Avengers' director's chair now that Favreau is out?

Jon Favreau Won't Direct 'Avengers,' Explains 'Iron Man 2' Tie-In Process [MTV News]

Variety reports that Unique Features plans to adapt the teen romance, written by Maggie Stiefvater. Shiver, which is part of a planned trilogy, was released just this August, but has already spent six weeks on the bestseller list, scoring with that popular formula of an isolated girl who develops an apparently doomed romance with a supernatural being.

The protagonist Grace was saved in her childhood by a yellow-eyed wolf who turns out to be Sam, a young lycanthrope who spends the spring and summer as a human, but becomes a wolf as the months get colder. On top of that, werewolves spend less time as humans as they age. Naturally, the pair fall in love and seek to keep Sam from reverting to his animal form for good.

Lovers of the supernatural may be eternally crazy for vampires, but with a remake of The Wolfman well underway and MTV's shot at a drama-filled Teen Wolf, it looks like we'll be seeing some fur with our fangs, at least for awhile.

[Variety]

/Film reported that Philip Seymour Hoffman and Chloe Moretz were both listed as cast members on the New York Times movie page for Let Me In, the remake of the original Swedish film, leading to speculation that Hoffman would be playing Let Me In's counterpart to Hakan, the adult man who watches after and hunts for the vampire child Eli (who will named Abby in the remake).

Overture Films has since denied Hoffman's involvement, but did not comment on whether Moretz, who recently wrapped filming as the gun-toting pixie Hit Girl in Kick-Ass, will, in fact, play Abby. But Moretz has been one of the frontrunners for Abby (we posted her audition, as well as those of two other young actresses), and her mother has announced that a she has just signed a big role, soon to be revealed, leading credence to this particular rumor.

Another strange tidbit from the New York Times page is the alternate titles listed for the film. In addition to Let Me In, the oft-cited remake title, Fish Head is listed as an alternate title, for reasons no one seems able to determine.

[New York Times via /Film]

In Xombie, a zombie named Dirge has somehow managed to retain his human consciousness, though not his memories, and tries to live a quietly life with his undead dog Cerberus until he eventually decays into oblivion. But when a human girl, Zoe, falls from a helicopter into zombie-infested territory, Dirge takes it upon himself to perform one last good deed before he falls apart and guide her to the city of human survivors. The task puts them both in the path of a millennia-old Egyptian mummy woman and a reanimated Velociraptor. Xombie creator James Farr began the story as an online Flash cartoon, then penned a comic book sequel, Xombie: Reanimated.

The Hollywood Reporter reports that Farr, a homicide detective, is currently in negotiations with DreamWorks for the rights to Xombie, with Kurtzman and Orci in talks in produce. No word yet on whether the pair could write the screenplay as well, nor whether the planned adaptation would be animated or live-action.

'Xombie' getting the Kurtzman/Orci treatment at DreamWorks [The Hollywood Reporter]
[Xombie Online]

Dacre Stoker, the author's great-grandnephew, along with Ian Holt, a Dracula historian, has put together Dracula: The Un-Dead, which Stoker's estate is calling the official sequel to Stoker's original. The younger Stoker claims the book is based on excised portions of Bram Stoker's original book, as well as his additional notes. The book takes place a quarter century after the events of Dracula, when disaster befalls the first novel's survivors:

Dracula The Un-Dead begins in 1912, twenty-five years after Dracula "crumbled into dust." Van Helsing's protégé, Dr. Jack Seward, is now a disgraced morphine addict obsessed with stamping out evil across Europe. Meanwhile, an unknowing Quincey Harker, the grown son of Jonathan and Mina, leaves law school for the London stage, only to stumble upon the troubled production of "Dracula," directed and produced by Bram Stoker himself.

The play plunges Quincey into the world of his parents' terrible secrets, but before he can confront them he experiences evil in a way he had never imagined. One by one, the band of heroes that defeated Dracula a quarter-century ago is being hunted down. Could it be that Dracula somehow survived their attack and is seeking revenge? Or is their another force at work whose relentless purpose is to destroy anything and anyone associated with Dracula?

Dracula: The Un-Dead arrives October 13, and two studios are reportedly already in negotiations for the movie rights. But it would be nice to see the authors release an annotated edition as well, so we could see to what extent the book comes from Bram Stoker's own ideas, and to what extent we're simply seeing another pair of hands tackling the classic characters.

[ShockTillYouDrop]

Deadline is reporting that Waltz, who has received much acclaim as the fearsome Nazi Colonel Hans Landa in Quentin Tarantino's latest film, has been cast as Chudnofsky, The Green Hornet's main foe. Waltz is like a better match for the role, which Gondry has described as a terrifying foil to Seth Rogen's more comical superhero.

[Deadline via /Film]

August, who had been tapped as the screenwriter on Shazam!, announced in January that the film was dead and buried, citing the sense that movie executives want more superhero movies like The Dark Knight. But producer Michael Uslan quickly assured us that a Captain Marvel movie was still in the works, and it looks like he was telling the truth.

Warner Bros. has announced that Bill Birch (now being affectionately called "Billy" Birch by media outlets to make him sound more like Marvel's alter ego Billy Batson) is on board to write the script. Otherwise, the movie's lineup remains the same, with Get Smart director Peter Segal set to direct.

This may be Birch's first foray into writing for a feature film, having spent most of his Hollywood career as an actor, but he'll have some help along the way. Geoff Johns, who most recently brought the Shazam! family of characters back into DC's limelight with the Justice Society of America arc "Black Adam and Isis," will be co-writing the story with Birch.

[The Hollywood Reporter]

ABC claims it has been working with Kauffman for years on a possible small-screen adaptation of Audrey Niffenegger's novel. The plan is for the romance between Clare and the time-traveling (and, incidentally, television-allergic) Henry to unfold over the course of several seasons, with individual episodes having their own story lines.

Normally, I'm all for adapting novels for television and giving them more room to breathe than they get in a feature film, but with The Time Traveler's Wife, I'm much more hesitant. The novel is such a self-contained animal, constantly folding in on itself and exploring the predestination paradox created by Henry's time travel and the tragic consequences of his condition, making it much more suited to a miniseries or feature film than a long-form television epic. And Journeyman, Fox's now-defunct series that also focused on involuntary time travel, worked because it was an adventure and mystery story, and its time-traveling protagonist was able to alter the timeline with his actions. Henry is, by comparison, leading a fairly ordinary life, and can alter nothing. But I suspect that, in a full-length series, Henry's time travel would be an incidental part of his character, and we would be seeing more of a How I Met Your Mother where the romantic lead occasionally happens to visit younger and older versions of his wife.

'Time Traveler's Wife' Series Travels to ABC [The Wrap via /Film]

While Ridley Scott is hard at work on his Gladiator-style interpretation of Robin Hood, Warner Bros. has signed a deal with director Nicolai Fuglsig and writer Jason Dean Hall to fling the story far into the future. Set in a dystopian London, the new film will follow a band of rebellious thieves who inspire a downtrodden populace with their acts of defiance.

This would be Fuglsig's first venture into feature films, but he has garnered a name for himself for directing innovative and visually striking commercials:

During an interview with HitFix, Gilliam mentioned his admiration for Dick's work, and when asked about the possibility of adapting The Man in the High Castle, Gilliam revealed that he would be meeting with Dick's daughter to discuss bringing a different Dick novel to the screen:

One of the things that is... there's another one that people don't know called "The World According to Jones." Do you know that one? That really fascinates me... where we're in a world where basically everything is relative. It can't be black and white because there's a more religious fundamentalism that we're talking about. So now everything is relative. And then the idea that a guy comes along that can see the future, and it is not relative... that intrigues me, and I don't know exactly how to do it.

The book is actually The World Jones Made, a 1956 novel set on a post-apocalyptic Earth. After clashes between political and moral ideologies led to a devastating nuclear conflict, a world government, called Fedgov, instituted a strict orthodoxy of moral relativism. Anyone may believe what they want, but any person who tries to impose their beliefs upon others — or asserts a belief as fact — will end up in a labor camp. But one man, Floyd Jones, has an unusual precognitive ability, and quickly goes from telling fortunes at a carnival to instigating a war against an apparently unintelligent alien species.

It's easy enough to see how, despite it being one of Dick's less acclaimed novels, Gilliam would be attracted to Jones. It's chalk full of moral ambiguity, high concepts, and oddball bits ripe for Gilliam's visually powerful imagination — atomic mutants who perform in live sex shows, humans who genetically engineer themselves for life on Venus, and spore-based aliens. But I can't help but wonder if Gilliam's dreaminess is too good a match for Dick's, and if the combination of the two would yield too abstract a film. Still, if Gilliam does move forward with a Dick adaptation, the product should be, at the very least, a fascinating watch.

[HitFix via /Film]

In Morgan's novel, set in the 25th Century, human memories are backed up and stored in cortical stacks, data storage systems implanted in the human body. If the body dies, the stack can be "resleeved" in another body, enabling human beings to become essentially immortal. But only the very rich can afford to be resleeved frequently, and when one such very wealthy, very long-lived individual, Laurens Bancroft, dies, his stack is shockingly destroyed as well. Thanks to a remote backup, Bancroft is able to be resleeved again, but finds he's missing the memories from the 48 hours prior to his death. While the police rule Bancroft's death a suicide, Bancroft himself believes he was murdered. To solve the mystery of his death, Bancroft has soldier Takeshi Kovacs resleeved into a cop's body. Kovacs is thrust into a world of violence and intrigue, dealing with the dark realm of world politics, enemies from his past, and the fact that the body he now inhabits belongs to someone else.

McTeigue was working on a big-screen adaptation Altered Carbon when he was approached to direct his upcoming action film Ninja Assassin. He is currently at work on The Raven, a film that speculates on the final days of Edgar Allan Poe, but in an interview with /Film, McTeigue said Altered Carbon is still very much on the table:

I still hope to make [Altered Carbon] with Joel [Silver]. There is a really good script that I've developed for a while, and I'd love to do that when the time is right, and hopefully that time will be shortly. We've started actively talking about that again.

Hopefully this is more than just idle talk. Altered Carbon made our list earlier this year of books that deserve to be made into movies, and it would be great to see McTeigue bring the same cyberpunk sensibilities that he helped the Wachowskis bring to the Matrix trilogy, as well as see a futuristic mystery story on the big screen.

[/Film]