Update: I apologize, I haven't been online much due to the holidays. I realized that there was an erroneous data point for Andrew Stanton in 2009 that was never supposed to be there. I missed it when I initially looked over the graph, but it's been removed now.

As we've been reflecting on the last ten years, we've been asking ourselves whether any true "masters" of science fiction and urban fantasy have emerged, especially in film and television. It's certainly been a decade of highs and lows, of old masters who've begun to fade and bright new stars just cresting the horizon.

To that end, I've attempted to chart the relative "master levels" of various directors and television producers over the several years. This is an utterly unscientific chart; I looked at the projects these folks have had since 2000 and assigned each one a "master level." The number reflects my understanding of the projects acclaim, its ability to attract an audience (i.e. box office/Nielsen numbers), its awards, whether it succeeded in something unusual (such as a relatively popular foreign language film in the case of Guillermo del Toro's Pan's Labyrinth or Dr. Horrible's status as a breakthrough web film), and the nebulous sense that it add or subtracted from the individual's "geek cred." The numbers themselves are largely subjective and, of course, you should feel free to nitpick.

The greater purpose was to offer a watercolory sense of whether any "masters" have emerged from this crowd. Certainly, the last year has brought low some of the genres' promising potentials. Joss Whedon entered into the decade riding high on a Buffy/Angel cocktail. Though his name wasn't enough to overcome Fox's confusing treatment of Firefly, but the show's eventual cult popularity led to the Serenity feature film, and the Whedon brand helped make Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog an important moment for web-based content. Perhaps this all made Dollhouse — which has been, by turns, frustrating and brilliant — all the more disappointing, its impeding demise fairly readily accepted, even by Whedon's fanbase. Similarly, Ron Moore's Battlestar Galactica, despite being regarded by some readers as the most overrated scifi of the decade, was regarded by many as a turning point for smart, politically savvy space opera. But a rocky final season punctuated by finale filled with dei ex machinae left a lot of folks sour on the entire series. And the Wachowskis, while doing a solid (though Alan Moore-enraging) bit of cinema with V for Vendetta, never quite lived up to the promises of The Matrix.

But there have been plenty of masterful bright spots as well. Bryan Fuller gave us some beautiful urban fantasy with shows with Dead Like Me, Wonderfalls, and Pushing Daisies, even if many of his efforts (including the truly amazing The Amazing Screw-On Head) were prematurely axed, or shafted before ever getting off the ground. Guillermo del Toro brought us to great heights with Pan's Labyrinth, even if his other eye candy films didn't hit the same heights.

So have we seen any masters? Peter Jackson has certainly come close. Granted, The Lord of the Rings movies are high fantasy, but they showcased Jackson's ability to handle a difficult epic in a way that not only pleased JRR Tolkien's fans, but also won him mainstream accolades. And his remake of King Kong, which should have been automatically anathema, proved both profitable and well-reviewed. The Lovely Bones has been his blip, earning him his worst reviews in 20 years. But it's more likely that 2009 will be remembered as the year Jackson introduced the world to filmmaker Neill Blomkamp, demonstrating that he has a good eye for new talent and the Hollywood cache to bring that talent to light. It's not for nothing that he made this year's power list.

Another power list member, JJ Abrams, has also given us a good spate of fun and thoughtful science fiction. While he didn't give us the decade's best monster movie, he did manage to reboot the Star Trek franchise in a way that was respectful to what came before and drew in folks who never turned into the TV shows. Of course, we still have yet to see as Lost will end and whether Fringe will survive.

Chris Nolan is on the list of promising possibilities for eventual masterhood. Although Memento wasn't science fiction, it took a "what if" concept (here, what if a man searching for his wife's killer had no short term memory) and portrayed it in a thoughtful, suspenseful, and ultimately heartbreaking way. And he not only shot fresh blood into the corpse of the Batman franchise, he made it Oscar-worthy. And now he's continuing the science fiction thread with Inception.

And, of course, there's the question of whether James Cameron will prove the kind of science fiction as much as he claimed to be the king of the world. His foray into science fiction television, Dark Angel, never fared particularly well in the ratings; it was eventually canceled in favor of Firefly, and it never achieved the posthumous popularity of the later show. But perhaps Avatar is the reinforcement of his previous scifi successes, proof that he can still be relevant where other long-time directors have started to fade away. Hopefully, we won't have to wait another 12 years to see his next installment.

Personally, though, after seeing the delightful Monsters Inc. followed by the superb The Incredibles and WALL-E, I have my fingers crossed for Andrew Stanton and Pixar Studios. Here's hoping that John Carter of Mars is something phenomenal.

Still, singling out directors and producers as possible masters might be missing the point entirely, even when we're talking about movies and TV. Alan Moore might well be your science fiction master, not just because he has written so many fantastic books, but also because those books have captured the imagination of so many directors in the last several years — albeit with varying results. And in the coming years we'll see how comic book writer Brian K. Vaughan — who has been working on Lost as well as the Buffy Season Eight comics — translates to the big screen when Y: The Last Man, Ex Machina, and Runaways hit theaters.

So who, if anyone, do you see as your science fiction master? Someone from the list above? Perhaps Russell T. Davis for reviving and expanding Doctor Who? Or maybe writers like Jane Espenson, who have worked on so many of the shows we love? And, with filmmakers like Neill Blomkamp and Duncan Jones arriving on the scene, who might prove themselves master of the genre in the next ten years?

Graph by Steph Fox.

Here's a bonus chart, with more data:

Tar Tarkas befriends the transported Civil War soldier, John Carter when he winds up on Mars. The Tharks are normally an unfeeling race, but Dafoe's character is different — and after deciding not to kill John Carter, the two become friends. Now he must teach his green people peace. Luckily, it's not ss if Willem Dafoe hasn't already tackled even more ridiculous characters. With Andrew Stanton's skills, and a few other perks, this movie could become a huge sensation. But it also could slip away from mainstream audiences pretty easily.

We'll have to wait a long while to see — production supposedly doesn't start until 2010.

[The Hollywood Reporter]

"Utah has become Hollywood's destination spot for depicting exotic intergalactic worlds.," notes the state's Salt Lake Tribune, citing the new Star Trek, the original Planet of the Apes, and now, the adaptation of Edgar Rice Burroughs' pioneering Barsoom saga.. But while Star Trek spent just four days shooting in the Beehive State, the Tribune reports that director Andrew Stanton's (WALL-E) production will spend at least seven months there, including 45 days of filming. The state has other ties to Burroughs; he served as a railroad cop in Salt Lake City in 1904.

Burroughs' John Carter novels, about a Civil War vet who finds himself doing a lot of alien-fighting and princess-rescuing on the planet next door, are the source of what will be the first live-action movie for much of the Pixar team. The script, co-written by Stanton, got a recent polish from Michael Chabon. We've been waiting for a good John Carter movie since, oh, about 1917, so the prospect of Disney's 2012 release fills us with childlike glee. No doubt Utahns feel the same way; the $28 million and 400 jobs the production is expected to bring to the state should more than make up for losing the Footloose remake to Georgia. (With Chace Crawford instead of Zac Efron in the lead? Georgia can have him.)

Artist David Krentz posted his concept art of Woola, from the same Paramount production that Favreau was in line to produce, and possibly direct:

Let's hope Andrew Stanton's Mars includes aliens with the same level of loveability mixed with scariness. [Twitter]

Stanton spilled many beans - and corrected many rumors - during the Santa Barbara Film Festival this weekend. He revealed that, despite what many thought, Carter would not be a Pixar movie, but instead come out under the Disney banner, even though it will be created using a lot of Pixar talent. The script is already in its second draft, and Stanton expects the movie to have a shorter development time than his animated movies due to his long-standing love of the original stories; he joked that he's been developing the movie in his head since childhood.

The look of the film will be "very real," and not highly-stylized, due to what Stanton sees as the way the original story has been ripped off by many different movies over the years; it'll also be a faithful retelling, with Carter remaining the Civil War soldier that he was in Burroughs' original. Again, despite what many have been saying, the film will be both live action and not shot in 3-D (although he feels that Disney may end up disagreeing with him on that latter point), and he's suitably daunted by the prospect of live action directing, commenting that,

It is huge, it is exciting, it scares the crap out of me. It’s either going to make me or break me.

We're betting on the former; Stanton is a very talented man, and this continues to look like the ideal movie for him.

Quint has JOHN CARTER OF MARS info from Andrew Stanton! [Ain't It Cool]

1. J.J. Abrams, Roberto Orci, Alex Kurtzman and Damon Lindelof. These four guys, between them, pretty much created half the most influential works in the genre right now. On television, Abrams and Lindelof's Lost has shown how to make science fiction into watercooler-talk material. Abrams, Orci and Kurtzman's new show, Fringe, has only been on for a few months but feels like a genre classic already. Abrams is also responsible for the ground-breaking (and camera-shaking) Cloverfield.
Up next: The foursome is responsible for bringing Star Trek back from franchise purgatory. And Orci and Kurtzman have co-written Transformers 2.

2. Will Smith, star of I Am Legend and Hancock. It's hard to think of an actor who can make a project into a hit more easily than Smith, right now. Just imagine Hancock without Smith's legendary affability behind it, and you've got a mighty dud.
Up next: Sequels/prequels to both Hancock and Legend are being bandied about.

3. Jeff Robinov, president of Warner Bros. He championed the idea of giving indie director Chris Nolan the reigns of the Batman films. He's been a key figure in getting movies like Watchmen on the screen. (And he killed the Wonder Woman movie, reportedly because he doesn't think women can carry action movies. But this is the "power list," not the "people we agree with" list.)
Up next: He's in charge of the umpteenth big-screen reinvention of Superman.

4. James Cameron, director of Avatar. Cameron's 3-D space epic won't be out for another year, but it's already revolutionizing the way people think about movies. He's pioneered a whole new system of 3-D cameras, but also created new motion-capture techniques for his alien creatures. Even before the film comes out, everybody else is already playing catch-up. Meanwhile, Cameron discovered Sam Worthington, who stars in Avatar, and pimped him out as one of the leads in Terminator 4.
Up next: Avatar comes out next December.

5. Kevin Feige, President of Marvel Studios. Warner Bros. may have cornered the market on superheroes-as-serious-dramas, but Marvel owns the idea of a superhero movie universe, complete with crossovers and fan-friendly in-jokes. Between them, Iron Man and Incredible Hulk proved that the superhero punch-'em-up films can feel like pieces of a saga... and make tons of money.
Up next: Another Iron Man, plus Captain America, Avengers, Thor, Ant-Man...

6. Kanye West, rapper/singer. He helped bring a science fiction motif back to music with his Daft Punk collaborations and space-odyssey stage show. He's the reason for Beyonce's cyborg hand.
Up next: His new album, "808s and Heartbreaks," uses an "Autotune" to make his vocals sound more computery and spacey, and it's already the #1 record in the United States.

7. Christopher Nolan, director of The Dark Knight and The Prestige. The Dark Knight was the biggest movie of 2008, but it also showed that grotesque characters and people in funny costumes could be compelling and visceral.
Up next: Nobody knows. Hopefully, another Batman film, but maybe first another mindblowing non-franchise pic like Prestige.

8. Neal Stephenson, author of Anathem. We knew Stephenson's next book would be a hit, thanks to his huge following. But Anathem, with its story of a world where science and technology are separated and pure scientists live in "Maths," captured the imagination of mainstream critics. Suddenly, novels of ideas are cool again.
Up next: Nobody knows. Unless you do?

9. Andrew Stanton, director of Wall-E. Even before his lonely robot movie came out, it had already sparked a whole giant wave of science fiction animated movies. (It looks like exactly one of those movies, Monsters Vs. Aliens, will be good.) People are arguing over what was the best movie of 2008: Wall-E or Dark Knight.
Up next: He's supposed to be directing a live-action movie of John Carter of Mars.

10. Stephenie Meyer, author of Twilight and The Host. I'll be honest: I haven't read any of the Twilight books, or seen the movie. They don't sound like my cup of tea. But the Twilight movie was a huge success, one of the biggest book adaptations in ages. And Meyer's adult science fiction novel, The Host, was surprisingly good: the story of a love triangle between a woman, a man, and the symbiote that is trying to control the woman's body. The Host has been on the Times bestseller list for 29 weeks, outselling pretty much any other recent science fiction book by many orders of magnitude. I would happily go see a Host movie.
Up next: Probably more Twilight books, despite Meyer's vow to stop writing them. The Host also seems to be leading towards a sequel.

11. Guillermo Del Toro, director of Pan's Labyrinth and Hellboy 2. He's managed to bridge the gap between arthouse darling and mainstream monster-movie maker in a way almost nobody has done before. No wonder he's been tapped to take on the Hobbit movies.
Up next: Besides Hobbit, GDT is attached to 500 other movies, including Frankenstein, Jekyll, The Champions, Hellboy 3, etc. etc.

12. Bioware, maker of Mass Effect and Star Wars: Knights OF The Old Republic. With Mass Effect, BioWare helped recharge the genre of space-opera RPG, following the adventures of Commander Shepard, who encounters aliens and murderous artificial intelligences. This came on the heels of success of past games like Jade Empire and Star Wars: KTOR.
Up next: A new MMO, Star Wars: The Old Republic comes out next year.

13. Donna Langley, President of Production at Universal Pictures. When she was an independent producer, she produced The Cell, Austin Powers 2 and other science fiction films. And after she joined Universal, she shepherded Children Of Men to the screen, and she's worked hard to nail Del Toro down to make four movies for Universal, including Frankenstein — and she's been pushing the idea of a Hellboy TV series.
Up next: Her upcoming projects include Army Of Two, a scifi video-game movie.

14. Michael Chabon, author of The Yiddish Policemen's Union. Not only did his literary work of alternate history win Hugo, Nebula and Locus awards, but the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Adventures Of Kavalier And Clay has championed the literary worth of science fiction with his book Maps And Legends and his two anthologies of science fiction by literary authors.
Up next: Supposedly the Coen Brothers are filming Yiddish.

15. Brian Michael Bendis and Joe Quesada, Marvel Comics. It's been obvious for a while now that the competition between Marvel and DC was a lop-sided one, but maybe 2008 is the year we call it a victory once and for all. Bendis, as writer, have been responsible for series like House of M, Secret Invasion, and New Avengers. And Quesada has helped make other series, like Civil War, into sales juggernauts. DC might have Grant Morrison, Geoff Johns and Neil Gaiman writing for it, but Marvel has the readership.
Up next: Yet another big status-quo-massaging event, Dark Reign.

16. Jennifer Jackson, agent with Donald Maass and Associates. Her name comes up more often than any other agent's, when you're talking book deals. And she's the top dealmaker of 2008, according to Publisher's Marketplace, with a dozen high-profile deals in the past year. Her clients include hot writers like Elizabeth Bear, Ken Scholes, Jay Lake and Mary Robinette Kowal.
Up next: She just sold Amanda Downum's The Drowned City to Orbit Books, in a three-book deal.

17. Will Wright, Spore creator. Wright's The Sims is the best selling computer game in history, and other titles like SimCity also remain huge and groundbreaking. But his build-a-lifeform game, Spore, has sparked new levels of creativity — and debate over whether it accurately reflects evolution.
Up next: We're not sure.

18. Brian Goldner, Hasbro CEO. Who could have imagined the toy tie-in movie would become a huge force in Hollywood again? Goldner, that's who. He helped make Transformers and G.I. Joe into summer blockbuster material.
Up next: More toy movies. Says the man himself: "If you remember Stretch Armstrong, there's an opportunity to tell this great backstory of who Stretch Armstrong is, and why he's so incredible and yet funny."

19. Jeff Walker, the independent movie publicist who brought Hollywood to Comic-Con. Hard as it is to believe, Comic-Con was once a comic convention. And now it's the place where Hollywood studios unveil their latest projects and shimmy for the approval of tens of thousands of die-hard fans. Walker helped engineer that transformation.
Up next: Comic-Con keeps getting huger and more unmanageable. Are the studios going to start skipping it, like Paramount did this year?

20. Weta Workshop. The New Zealand practical effects studio came to prominence working on Peter Jackson's Lord Of The Rings movies, and now it's the go-to place for science fiction epics, including The Day The Earth Stood Still, Fantastic 4: Rise Of The Silver Surfer, X-Men 3, I, Robot and many others, along with its sister company Weta Digital.
Up next: Weta was supposedly hard at work on Justice League, but no longer. Still on the slate are a mooted Halo film, Avatar, Tintin and the Hobbit films.

Rich and interesting on many levels, Wall-E can be enjoyed merely as light fun if you don't squint too hard. Wall-E is a trash compactor robot, absolutely cute as a button and beautifully animated by the Pixar geniuses, who was left on Earth after the planet has become so toxic that humans can no longer survive on it. He and his many robo-companions are part of "project cleanup," spearheaded by the corporate oligarchs at the Buy n Large corporation. While robots scour the Earth, humans will live in vacation-liner luxury on a BnL ship near a lovely purple nebula.

Unfortunately, as we discover later, things have gone a bit wrong. The humans are now on year 700 of their space vacation, and Wall-E lives an eccentric, lonely existence on a planet covered in graceful, skyscraper-high spirals of garbage he's built. He spends his days with a little cockroach pal, compacting trash and collecting intriguing bits of trash and watching dance routines from Hello, Dolly! on a souped-up VCR.

He's jolted out of his "clean up garbage" programming directive when Eve arrives on Earth — she's a probe dispatched by the human ship every few years to check to see if the planet has begun to grow plants again. Once there are plants, the humans will return for "recolonization." A sleek little iPod-looking creature, Eve becomes Wall-E's first friend in centuries. They are slowly coming to like each other when she discovers a plant and her own programming directive kicks in. She powers down, becoming an inert container whose whole purpose in life is to deliver the plant back to the ship an initiate recolonization. Desperately in love and wanting to remain with Eve, Wall-E follows her back to the human ship (by clinging to the outside of her rocket in an amazing "floating through the galaxy" sequence).

Through Wall-E's eyes, we see what humanity has become. Low gravity in space over many generations and centuries of time has turned humans into boneless blobs who scoot around on antigrav chairs, constantly eat and drink BnL fast food products, and are waited on hand and foot by robots. They're all constantly plugged into the net, doing everything in virtual reality and obeying every command to "consume" that's piped over the BnL ship's loudspeakers. It's a consumerist dystopia, and the only sympathetic characters in it are the rebellious robots who help Wall-E and Eve overcome crazy obstacles to lock the ship into recolonization mode so they can return to Earth and live happily ever after.

The love between Wall-E and Eve is quite touching — they risk their lives for each other, and in the process prevent the HAL-like robot Auto from retaining permanent control of the cruise ship. Taken as fairy tale symbols, Wall-E and his robot pals represent a hopeful future generation, while the fat, consumption-controlled humans are an older generation whose wasteful ways cannot be sustained.

One of the terrifically interesting subtexts of Wall-E is that our hero robot has survived over 700 years by recycling. By gathering up pieces of useful garbage and storing it in his garbage truck home, Wall-E always manages to have spare parts that he can use to repair himself. And the film itself is a kind of masterpiece of recycling: cobbled beautifully together from the plots and styles of 1960s and 70s films, as well as the silent comedy of Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton. Director Stanton deliberately created a visual style that recalls the lens flarey look of 70s scifi like Silent Running or the Planet of the Apes movies.

And Auto, the out-of-control autopilot program that runs the BnL ship, is a glowing red eye deliberately intended to recall 2001 (there are other 2001 moments too, where the roly-poly humans try to walk on two legs and the 2001 infamous "apes using tools" Strauss music plays). The brand-plastered interior of the BnL ship also recalls 2001, which aside from an AI-run-amok movie was also a meditation on the corporate-controlled future.

I think the key to understanding what Wall-E is really about, however, means recalling the plot of Charlie Chaplin's little-guy-caught-in-the-gears movie Modern Times. Like the Little Tramp in that film, Wall-E is a kind-hearted outcast whose entire life is devoted to work and who can only communicate through gestures and strange sounds (Modern Times was a silent movie filmed during the sound era, so it's full of noises but none of the characters speak). The one time anyone talks in Modern Times is when a Big Brother-esque face orders workers around from a screen over the factory floor where the Little Tramp works.

In a similar vein, Wall-E incorporates live action into the otherwise animated film when an authority figure (the president of BnL) speaks in old video files from 700 years ago. The only other live action moments are dance sequences from Hello, Dolly!, another film about the romances of little people escaping from work. The point of Modern Times (and Hello, Dolly! to a certain extent) is that love can rescue us from the horrors of labor — or what Wall-E and Eve call their "directives." The Little Tramp finds his Gamine, and they sing and dance their way into a sweet, romantic future. Dolly helps shop clerks find love. And in Wall-E, the love between two robots doesn't just erase the horror of work — it also has the potential to erase the horror of the polluting output of labor that has turned Earth into a pile of industrial waste surrounded by a layer of space junk.

The problem in with this "love conquers pollution" scenario from Wall-E is the humans. Though their ship brings them back to recolonize Earth, none of them can walk and their skeletons have evaporated. They literally can't live on Earth. And they have no idea how to grow food — the captain of the ship promises his crew farms where they'll grow "pizza plants." They've lived their lives in a giant vacation mall, eating "cupcakes in a cup." How can they possibly rebuild an entire ecosystem?

And besides, there's a more sinister backstory to what's left of the human race that takes place mostly off-screen. In flashbacks to the live-action video of the BnL president, we see him explain in a panicked voice that "operation cleanup" has failed, and the Earth is so toxic nobody can survive. So the vacationers should just "stay away." In other words, everybody on Earth is dead except for those who could afford to take what is billed as "an executive class cruise" on the BnL ship. What's left of the human race are the pale, mindless lumps descended from the richest people on the planet 700 years ago. Nobody else survived.

It's a grim idea indeed, unless you consider that the robots who return to Earth with the humans are going to be just fine. They're solar-powered, can navigate the trash piles easily with wheels and antigrav, and they don't need to worry about toxic air because they don't breathe oxygen. They've even formed a community of sorts and are likely to live happily ever after as the humans slowly waste away without the comforts of the Auto-run ship.

To return to the point I began with, the robots have managed to reprogram themselves to be autonomous, and to care for one another. It's even likely that over time they might be able to mend the Earth by keeping it clean. The robots, after all, have no need to create more waste. In fact, they'll have to reuse it to survive. The humans, however, have only become more deeply programmed over the years. They've returned to Earth less capable of taking care of it than when they left.

Ultimately, the question you should ask yourself while watching Wall-E is what this kid-friendly parable is teaching its impressionable watchers (and I include myself in that number). Is our most hopeful vision for the future that we will die out and a more rational, loving species will take over the planet for us? Or do we see ourselves in those robots, utterly transformed by an unimaginable future into creatures that we would no longer recognize as human — and yet carrying on the very best of human impulses in a way we never could?

We've wondered about it before, and now it's been confirmed by the one person who should know: Pixar is indeed working on a movie version of John Carter of Mars, with a script written by Wall-E's director Andrew Stanton, who also worked on Finding Nemo. The confirmation came from Stanton himself, talking to fans after a convention appearance in Toronto last week.

Pixarblog reports:

The disclosure came at the end of the short, but extremely enjoyable, discussion (excerpts of which will be published here soon), when a writer from Suite101.com asked about Stanton's next project, to which Stanton mentioned (not too loudly) 'John Carter of Mars'.

Doubting what I'm hearing, I interject, "What is that?" "John Carter of Mars", Stanton replies. "You're confirming John Carter? Are you serious?" At this point, I turn my tape recorder back on, "...say that on tape!", I tell him. Stanton: "I am writing John Carter of Mars right now." "Oh man, you just doubled my page views!", I say. Everybody laughs.

Earlier reports have had Pixar working on a trilogy of live-action movies based around the Edgar Rice Burroughs novels about civil war vet Carter who ends up a super-strong hero on Mars after a series of unlikely and scientifically improbably events, with the first being released somewhere around 2012. If nothing else, there's no way this could be as unnecessary as the confirmed Pixar release for 2010, Toy Story 3.

Andrew Stanton confirms John Carter of Mars [Pixarblog]

I really like the notion that Wall-E's crush on Eve, the far more advanced robot, forces her to evolve and become more self-aware. That could actually be cool to watch. And then Wall-E's quest somehow "reboots" the human race? It definitely seems like a more ambitious storyline than the Toy Story movies. [Slashfilm]

Disney/Pixar grabbed up a raft of domain names last Friday, including johncarterandthegodsofmars.com, johncarterandthewarlordofmars.com, godsofmarsmovie.com and warlordofmars-movie.com. And last August, Disney snagged johncarterofmars-movie.com and some variants, plus childrenofmars.com in November.

Jim Hill, who covers Disney in depth, says "insiders" claim Ratatouille screenwriter Mark Andrews has completed his first draft of a John Carter script. And both Disney and Pixar insiders are excited by the draft, and eager to put it into production. The movie could come out as soon as 2011 or 2012. Pixar has been saying for a while that it wants to do a live-action movie, and The Incredibles director Brad Bird will be directing 1906, about the San Francisco Earthquake, as a Disney/Pixar co-production.

Part of the urgency for a John Carter franchise comes from the fact that Disney is losing enthusiasm for the Narnia movies, and probably won't make any more after Prince Caspian and Dawn Treader, unless they massively outperform expectations. So Disney will have a Narnia-sized hole in its schedule in 2011 and beyond, which can only be filled with two-fisted sword-wrangling Martian action. [Jim Hill Media]

• Clip #1: Wall-E at work. Our little herobot works away in his role as the last working robot on the planet. It's 700 years after the human race was supposed to leave the planet so the disposal bots could clean the place up over the next five years. However, something has gone wrong, and we never returned. Over the intervening centuries, Wall-E keeps at his job, and he's developed a personality. While compacting trash, he keeps the more interesting finds in his lunchbox: a bra, a squeaky toy, an old boot, and so on. Plus, he has his little cockraoch buddy to keep him company.
• Clip #2: Eventually a spaceship lands on the planet and drops off a probe droid named EVE. Wall•E courts her for awhile, and eventually brings her back to his pimped out truck where he keeps all of his Earth junk. She nearly laser-zaps his singing Bigmouth Billy Bass on the wall, enjoys his bubble-wrap, breaks his egg-beater, and nearly brings down the house when she tries to emulate the dancing she sees in an old video Wall•E presents to her on VHS.
• Clip #3: The ship returns and EVE is tucked away onboard, ready to return to wherever she came from. Wall•E is terrified at the thought of losing his new friend, and tries to stow away on her ship but only makes it halfway up the ladder. He hangs on for dear life while they rocket into outer space, and he tags along for the ride all the way back to the megaship they dock in. Along the way, it's a touching tribute to our own space program (although the moon has been turned into an outlet mall), and previous space films like 2001.
• Clip #4: Wall-E creates some work-related problems for EVE, and she tries sending him home in an escape pod. However, she soon regrets her decision and goes off after him, although things are a bit more complicated since his pod is set to auto-destruct. Wall-E narrowly escapes, and with the use of a fire extinguisher as a thruster, he navigates his way back to her. Although Stanton promises that their relationship will become a lot more complicated.
• In response to being told that all the Pixar movies keep looking better and better, Andrew Stanton ask a fan, "Are you saying Toy Story is the ugliest film we've made? Well... it is!" Hey, we love a director with humility.