Iron Sky, the film about a secret Nazi Arctic base that launched a team of astro-nazis to the dark side of the moon during WW2, who have been quietly waiting until 2018 to strike, is moving into production. According to YLE, the creators of Star Wrek are ready to roll.

Producers will begin filming the Iron Sky feature film in Frankfurt next spring, and they hope to have the movie finished by the end of 2010...
Iron Sky has around five million euros to play around with. This means they can build real sets.

Fantastic, and perfect for the holidays. We cannot wait to see more from this crew, especially with a screenplay by Tiptree Award-winning author Johanna Sinisalo (Troll: A Love Story).

In this short film, which you can see a preview for above, two men go in search of "the thing with a thousand young," an insectile fertility god which the critics at Undead Backbrain suggest is probably the Old One known as Shub-Niggurath. In real life, "dirt daubers" are a kind of wasp that build cells of mud for their eggs.

The 35-minute short played at this year's Lovecraft Film Festival and Grim Reviews summed it up nicely:

Viewers eavesdrop on a creepy conversation between a strange, crude driver and his exponentially weirder passenger. Visceral imagery centering around a fish hatchery, an old railway tunnel, and a backwoods drive promotes a Lovecraftian atmosphere . . . Daniels' interpretation of HPL's cosmic fertility horror is refreshingly new. The director wisely shies away from explicit appearances by the chief monster itself in favor of cultivating an overarching atmosphere of weird horror. Further, the revelation of Dirt Dauber's main mystery at the end is far more unsettling than any CGI generated depiction of Shub-Niggurath could be. With that said, it should be noted that monsters do appear in several forms. The passenger's murky origins are quite monstrous from the movie's outset, long before Daniels resolves the mystery of his existence. Meanwhile, the driver's macabre worldview presents him as a dark creature in his own right, a boisterous horror who haunts the fish hatchery universe he relates in dialogue throughout the film.

Apparently there is also a subplot involving the sinking of the Titanic and outer space. Why isn't there a full version of this film available on YouTube?!

In the meantime, if you want to see some of filmmaker Daniels other movies, check out his YouTube channel.

Thanks, Avery Guerra!

Daybreakers, which comes out in theaters January 8th, is set in the future, when almost all humans have turned vampire. But with the increase in the vampire population comes the decrease in their food supply — in other words, the vampires are running out of humans. The shortage of human blood has lead to heavy dilution in the vampire blood banks, and a slow and painful vampire evolution into the fanged ugly you see above. Now it's up to vampire scientist Ethan Hawke to buck the system and find a peace between vampires and the living.

Plus if you want a good scare check out Daybreakers latest evolution trailer. Warning, it's a little loud, but still pretty creative.

Empire Magazine released a few new stills from The Last Airbender, some even with completed FX, looking golden. Slashfilm managed to get their hands on a few scans from the issue and here's the Aang money shot — he looks both tiny and deadly, perched a top a tiny piece of wood.

Check out Slashfilm to see the additional images from the magazine. The Last Airbender will be out July 2, 2010.

According to the trades Producers Gil Adler and Shane McCarthy are set to Adapt Sci-Fi Horror Comic Night And Fog.
The story is set in WW2 and explores the effect of a dangerous and deadly mist that transforms the soldiers on the military base into "preternatural creatures of the night. But when the survivors try to kill them, they adapt and change into something even more horrific and unstoppable."

Adler produced both Constantine and Superman Returns, so I think you know what "type" of film we're dealing with here: solid TNT late-night viewing material. Still, no filming dates as of yet, but we'll keep you posted. The set pics should be pretty fantastic.

With Avatar now making enough money to justify its reportedly obscene budget, it's the perfect time to look at the central contradiction of Cameron's career. And IFC has a terrific essay looking at all the ways that Cameron has used high tech to tell stories about technology that will let you down or try to kill you. Writes Matt Singer:

Though we often associate Cameron's work with major advances in the field of special effects - think of the watery alien tendril in 1989's "The Abyss," or the liquid metal T-1000 in "Terminator 2: Judgment Day" - his movies consistently paint an unflattering portrait of technology, one that depicts it as something that is, at best, inadequate or, at worst, downright malevolent. Every film he has made since the original "Terminator," even the ones that aren't science-fiction or fantasy films like "True Lies and "Titanic," has used state-of-the-art filmmaking tools to tell stories about the way technology fails human beings.

In The Terminator, not only is a machine from the future trying to kill Sarah Connor, but her roommate bites it because she's listening to a walkman, and Sarah nearly dies because she babbles her plans to a machine: her answering machine. In Terminator 2, two machines battle over Sarah's fate, and this time it's the obsolescence of the "good" Terminator that poses a problem. And Aliens is the flipside of Avatar, in which the technological humans are outmatched by a force of nature — except it's a ravenous xenomorph horde instead of blue hippies. (And both movies end with a showdown between a human and an alien, where the human wears a robotic suit.) In The Abyss, Ed Harris gets trapped on the bottom of the ocean trying to prevent a nuclear explosion, and doesn't have enough oxygen to return to safety.

Weirdly, Singer points out that at the end of Avatar, with — spoiler alert — almost all the humans banished, the moon of Pandora has been transformed at last into a purely natural world, without any artificial crap. And it's at that moment that Pandora becomes most computer-generated, with almost no live-action elements remaining. [IFC]

(To be entirely fair, the Moviefone poll asked "Which actress gave the worst performance?," so for all we know, America en masse may think Fox is a very talented actress who just had a series of really bad days.)

Fox's dual wins were reflected in the movie she won for, as well; Transformers: Revenge of The Fallen managed to win both Best Action Movie of 2009 and Worst Movie of 2009. Well, at least one of those is right.

Year-End Movies Poll Results [Moviefone] (Via)

In today's morning spoilers, we linked to eating class's analysis of the new trailer. Here's our shot-for-shot breakdown and speculation on what it means.

We know so far that DiCaprio is playing a CEO-type who enters people's dreams to steal information from their heads and Page plays his assistant. In the trailer, we get some moments inside the dream worlds as well as hints at how you wake a dreamer from their sleep.

In the first shot above, we see Leonardo DiCaprio spinning a top with great concentration. What is the purpose of the top? Later, we see several shots in which the laws of physics appear to be altered. Is the top some sort of test of the physics of a place?

His voiceover asks, "What's the most resilient parasite? An idea."

Now we see DiCaprio and his assistant Ellen Page staring at something with interest, but without fear.
And now we see what that is: the city is folding up and in on itself. But despite the folding, there is no destruction; nothing is breaking, no cars or people are falling, and no one is afraid of the change.

"A single idea from the human mind can build cities."

The water in the glass is shaking. Water does actually seem to indicate the physics of a place, as we'll see later in the trailer.
A man looks out the window at a fire in the street (eating class notes that this man is probably Luke Haas, who plays the character Nash). As the fire erupts into an explosion, it looks like the people an the street might be briefly reacting, suggesting this scene might take place in the real world instead of a dream world.

DiCaprio's voiceover continues, "An idea can transform the world and rewrite all the rules."

Inside what looks like a makeshift hospital, several people sleep on cots. It looks like wires or tubes lead from several bodies toward the ceiling. They could be suffering from some sort of illness, or they could be subjects in some sort of dream harvesting or research program. The man at the desk overseeing these people stands up to acknowledge someone who's just entered the room.

Dicaprio surveys the city from the roof of a building.

"Which is why I have to steal it."

Walking through a restaurant kitchen, DiCaprio pulls out a silencer for his gun.

A freight train barrels through the middle of a street, pushing cars out of the way.

Now Page is walking down the street while DiCaprio shouts advice at her. As we noted yesterday, it's a moment very reminiscent of The Matrix. DiCaprio is the mentor and Page travels through this strange world with us, learning the rules as we do.

DiCaprio tells her, "Never recreate from your memory. Always imagine new places."

The pair sit at a brasserie while groceries explode into the air next to them. Neither seems to particularly notice.

DiCaprio stares out the window of his car while Haas is being forcibly taken away by two men.

DiCaprio is talking to someone (Cillian Murphy?), saying, "He's hiding something and we need to find out what that is."

Joseph Gordon-Levitt's badass character and Tom Hardy have commandeered a cab and it looks like they get involved in some kind of car chase/shootout.

Now we're back to the glass of water. Although from our perspective, the table and the glass are in the same position, the water is now at a slant. Perhaps this indicates that, if the laws of physics were working properly, the glass and the table would be at a slant as well.

We get our first look at Ken Watanabe's villain, rising from bed, gun in hand. An ambush, perhaps?

A voiceover says, "We gotta break out of here."

A motorcycle chases a van through the fog.

Now we see the person talking is Gordon-Levitt. He shouts, "Give him the kick!" We know that people can enter other people's dreams through injections. Perhaps "the kick" is a way to wake the dreamer up and escape the dream.

Haas lets DiCaprio, who appears to be unconscious in a chair, fall back toward something.

A masked man walks into a room where two men in suits are being held prisoner.

DiCaprio screams, "This was not part of the plan!" Is that the same taxi from before?

Shots of DiCaprio continuing to fall into the tub are interspersed with shots of two men fighting. The water apparently wakes DiCaprio. He appears to have something around his wrist, and eating class noticed something coming out of his hand. Perhaps this is related to the wire/tube-like things we saw in the infirmary scene earlier.

We hear a woman, perhaps Page, screaming, "Wake me up! Wake me up!"

Two men approach a door, guns raised.
And we end on another fine water shot, with DiCaprio standing in the middle of a room as streams of water burst in overhead.

Collider is reporting, based on an unknown source, that Warner Brothers has canceled Jerry O'Flaherty's CG animated Thundercats origins story, based on the animated pilot. If you remember correctly, the Thundercats had to vacate their homeworld when it was destroyed.

And that sounds like a remarkable origins story, unlike most of the heroic origins that are being floated around Hollywood right now. Plus it has alien planets and cat people — sound familiar? But no, that couldn't possibly make any money. Plus it looked amazing, judging by the concept art of Third Earth.

But the "good" news is the flash video game is still being made along with The Orb of Madness, where you get to play Panthro. So, that's something.

But we're still baffled. Hasn't Avatar proved that alien features directed towards everyone can and do make money? So why get all gunshy over another alien features that not only has a bankable pre-existing audience, but more awesome cat people? Plus the merchandising alone has got to be making someone at Warner Brothers hungry. Hollywood, we urge you, this is one of the classic properties we want made into a film, we don't need a Labyrinth remake or another Neverending Story, just one good Thundercats film.

Reality TV producers are planning a new series based on Forks, Washington, the town that Meyer set her Twilight saga in. Right now, the crew is seeking out a cast based on everyday people that live in Forks. So nothing to do with Twilight at all, unless you overlook the fact that the half the town has converted to Twilight tourism, hawking Bella Berry Shakes, inviting tourists into their Twilight themed hotel rooms, and throwing a vampire birthday for Bella in which 1,000 young girls were in attendance.

This is a Twi-themed bedroom from the hotel The Pacific, in the Forks area.

And no this isn't the documentary called Twilight In Forks, this is an entirely different reality-based show about Forks. But still, the crew insists that the project will focus on the riveting lives of the ordinary people in Forks, not those who think they are vampires, or werewolves — because who wants to see that, besides the 100 people a day who clamor into Forks looking to get a piece of Edward?

[WENN via Cinimatical picture via Pyzam]

The First Avenger: Captain America is also aimed at a 2011 release (22 July, following Thor's May 20th release date), and Fangoria has let slip that the movie will start shooting in June next year, following Thor's principal shoot, which starts next month. We know that the movie will be directed by The Rocketeer's Joe Johnson and written by the team of Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely, probably best known for both Chronicles of Narnia movies, but beyond that, everything's been kept pretty much under wraps.

IMDB's plot synopsis just reiterates the character's origins during WWII, and it's a fair bet to assume that we'll see a lot of period action in Cap's solo movie. In fact, we're wondering if that's pretty much all we're going to see, because his arrival in the present day is so linked to Avengers lore to tell too much of that story without including the Avengers ahead of their own movie, which seems pretty unlikely. We already know that Avengers scriptwriter Zak Penn is a fan of Mark Millar's Ultimates retelling of Avengers history, so perhaps we should prepare for The First Avenger to repeat The Ultimates' first issue, which told the backstory of Captain America leading up to his accidental suspended animation, allowing for the Avengers movie to continue from that point, introducing him (and new viewers) to the characters from all the other movies who'll have teamed up to form Marvel's mega franchise.

Of course, we'll have to wait for casting announcements for the movie to start surfacing, allowing for more detailed and informed guesses as to what we're going to see during the First Avenger - not to mention what timeframe we're going to see it in - but don't be surprised if Marvel's 2011 movie slate will seek to expand the superhero genre in more epic, mythical directions (Thor) and more gritty, realistic "War Is Hell" ones at the same time.

The eagle eyed folks over at Slashfilm pointed out a major detail from the new Iron Man 2 trailer. It seems that for a split second in the new trailer Black Widow exposes a S.H.I.E.L.D. badge on her catsuit. The badge was previously removed from any official stills, as it would expose the secret of who she is and why she's working inside Stark's company. Here's the picture...

When we spoke with Scarlett Johansson back in the comic con the actresses played especially coy about her character's ties in the film.

What is your relationship to the other characters in the film?

Well I'll tell you that um, my character... there are two sides to my character. She's a bit of a shape shifter, I suppose. There's a side of the character that's kind of demure and covert - I wouldn't say that she's submissive, but she's blending in to the Stark Industries [team, as an assistant]. Then the other part of the character is a really aggressive, bad-ass character, that is sure of herself and is going to kick the shit out of you if you get in her way. So that's as about as much as I can tell you, and how that relates to the other characters.

I'm curious as to how your character balances out Whiplash and the other villains. A lot of people are saying two villains is too many, what does your character bring?

We don't know whether the character is villainous. She does have a dark past, and she is very seductive and distracting. We are not sure exactly where she's coming from, and what her intentions are, I'm not saying that will all be revealed. But there are a lot of characters in this movie, and a lot of new characters. And it is a balancing act. I think that between the huge explosive action, the romance, the battle of good versus evil - even within one's self - there's a nice balance between all of us. And I think fans will be excited to be taken down all these different journeys. They all really play into one another, and it doesn't feel like a lot of different films coming together. It feels like an ensemble. And you know, who can have too many villains?

In the comics your character works with Sam Jackson, do you have any scenes with Sam?

Um, I have worked with Sam Jackson.

She kept a tight lid on the plot details there, but this assumption seems to go along with comic books, and the "duality" issues that Scarjo is talking about above. Not a huge surprise, but a welcomed addition that keeps in canon with the comics.

The film stars Leonardo DiCaprio as a powerful CEO, Page as his assistant, Joseph Gordon-Levitt as a khaki suited bad-ass and Ken Watanabe as the bad guy. The basic plot is being heavily guarded and all imdb has to say about the picture is that, "A CEO-type becomes involved in a blackmailing scandal." But from the trailer I think it's safe to say that this blackmailing is at least happening from inside someone's thoughts, because "your mind is the scene of the crime." Also, is Page screaming "Wake me up!" at one point?

Out in theaters July 16.

[via Apple]

Here's the trailer:

Anime News is announcing that the kick-ass director of Sky Crawlers, Ghost in the Shell and the hotly anticipated Assault Girls film, Mamoru Oshii, is taking on a live action retelling of this classic robot. Which means it will most likely be massively better than the Imagi CG film we've been waiting for, which sadly just looked creepy in this teaser trailer.

The director has already adapted the material once before, mounting a stage production just earlier this year. The show featured a 6-metre tall (i.e., one-third scale) stage robot that was reportedly capable of free standing movement.

The story's hero is little Shotaro Kaneda, whose scientist father dies after spending his life building the ultimate weapon, a giant robot. After his passing, the robot is then given to the son, who uses it exactly the way you or I would: to fight crime and other evil robots. Originally titled Tetsujin 28-gō, this manga was created by Mitsuteru Yokoyama in the 50s. Then it was adapted to an anime series, and later translated to the states as Gigantor.

Superhero Hype has the latest news about Martin Campbell's, from Casino Royale, Green Lantern.

The entire thing will be shot by cinematographer Dion Beebe, who not only shot the amazing-looking Equilibrium, but won an Academy Award for Memoirs of a Geisha.

He'll be working with production designer Grant Major, who worked on The Ruins and King Kong and took home an Oscar for his work on Lord of The Rings. And costume designer Ngila Dickson, who also received an Academy Award for LOTR.

And finally Art Director François Audouy who helped bring the gorgeous scenes from Watchmen to life, is joining the crew. So it seems that Warner Brothers isn't screwing around with this picture, and is investing big money for big turn out. Gone are any campy expectations we had for this film, we're now expecting something much more epic.

Also, our insider sources tell us that production is readying in New Orleans, and should be expecting up to a thousand construction workers for sets and special effects at peak production. Rumors on the internet would lead us to believe that filming would then start in March, ending in either July of August 2010.

[Image Via Geek Tyrant]

Despite early concerns that Alvin And The Chipmunks: The Squeakquel would topple James Cameron's crown this weekend based on advance ticket sales, the second week of release for Avatar bodes incredibly well for the long-term prospects for the movie; it brought in an estimated $75 million, a staggeringly low drop-off when compared with its opening $77 million.

More impressively, Avatar's success comes despite the second most-successful film of the weekend, Sherlock Holmes breaking the record for the most successful Christmas opening of all time (Its estimated $65.4 million easily beating previous holder Meet The Fockers' $46.2 million), and amid the most successful weekend domestic box office gross of all time; this weekend, American cinemas took an estimated $285 million, up from July last year, when the opening of The Dark Knight led American theaters to a $260 million best. With these kinds of numbers, it's no surprise that box office records for IMAX were broken this weekend thanks to Avatar (Earning $12.1 million globally), or that the movie is #1 in all but one of its 108 countries of release right now (India is the only hold-out, but even there, it's #2). If this keeps up, then we may have discovered a film that'll topple Titanic off the most successful movie of all time title after all...

Tom Waltz told Comic Book Resources that, although it seems that Legion: Prophets may feature background characters and events to the Paul Bettany-starring movie out January 22nd, there's more going on that may seem at first apparent:

Our comic provides an exclusive expansion on some of the ideas and themes presented in the film and, perhaps, a hint at things to come should there be a movie sequel... Each of these people have been chosen as prophets to protect the only hope for humanity in the apocalypse - a special child, who is yet to be born (for more on that, you have to see the movie!). As the apocalypse strikes and angelic possession begins to plague the planet (again, see the movie!), all five of these seemingly ordinary folks quickly find out they have special gifts and powers that set them apart from other humans... as well as a unifying mission they've all been given hints to through strange (and sometimes horrific) visions. These are standalone issues, though the fourth issue does feature all five prophets. And did I mention these are not all of the prophets in 'Legion' lore? Hint, hint.

Does that mean more Legion comics, or just that Legion: Prophets leads directly into the movie? You can find out for yourself; the collection of Legion: Prophets is in stories now.

The Many Faces of "Legion" [Comic Book Resources]