The English-dubbed version of Indonesia's Lady Terminator contains the only English phrases you'll need to get through your day: "Is there any man who can satisfy me?" "I'll come back in a hundred years and have revenge on your great-grandaughter." Oh also, "I'm not a lady, I'm an anthropologist." And: "Hey listen, Jack and I have seen more dead bodies than you've eaten hot dogs. So just shut up and eat."

"It says here all three of these guys died with their cocks bitten off. Could be a small animal." "An eel?" "I've heard of the ultimate blow job, but this is too much."

Lady Terminator, made in Indonesia in the late 1980s, is that rare rip-off of a U.S. movie that forges off in a new direction, and approaches its own levels of sublimeness. The slogan, "First she mates, then she terminates," pretty much says it all. I love the flickering blue lightning coming out of her eyes and trashing the room — not to mention the "if the car is rocking" scene. Oh, and the guy scratching his head with a submachine gun.

Grad Student Madness explains what the hell this movie is about:

Here's the story: Years ago, the South Seas Queen, a figure from Javanese folklore, was perfectly happy killing men by letting the snake in her vagina bite off their dingly-danglies during intercourse. Unfortunately, some jerk yanks the snake out of her cootch and turns it into a dagger. She's pissed (who wouldn't be?) and vows revenge on his great-grandaughter. His thought, no doubt, at this point is, "Okay, Crazy, good luck with that grandaughter thing!"

Fast-forward to the 80s, when Tania, an anthropologist, is investigating the South Seas Queen. We know she's an anthropologist because of the immortal line: "I'm not a lady! I'm an anthropologist!" Anyway, Tania is scuba diving in the general vicinity of the old South Sea Queen place when her boat is capsized by a tsunami and she is dragged to the bottom of the sea and onto a bed in a perfectly dry room (No, I can't really explain that) where that sea serpent enters her vag (via really bad animation) and possesses her.

Tania emerges from the surf possessed and naked and the film proceeds to blatantly rip off entire sequences from Terminator as she hunts the grandaughter, who is an Indonesian pop singer, and get hunted by a cop with the worst mullet this side of country music. Countless people get shot, numerous scenes get lifted, clothes get shed with abandon. What's amazing to me about Lady Terminator is how it adapts James Cameron's movie for the Indonesian working-class audience by incorporating so much local mythology. It looks like the film we know until it gets into sea serpents and witchy queens who live at the bottom of the ocean. It's all fairly strange.

Big props to YouTube user Slasherfan, who put up 20 minutes of the best moments from this instant classic online. Here's another 10 minutes of Lady Terminator goodness:

Apparently oblivious to the fact that the franchise is up for sale and no-one knows who future owners will be or what they'll want, McG announced that he'll make two more Terminator movies, the first of which will feature Sarah Connor, even though "he's not sure how he's going to pull that off." We'd be more worried about future Terminator rights holders agreeing to him making two sequels to a critically-savaged movie that flopped at the box office (in comparison to expectations, at least; it's still in the top 20 movies of the year) and failed to prevent the bankruptcy of the owners of the property if we were him, but maybe there's a reason we're not successful Hollywood producer/directors and he is.

He was also disappointed that Salvation wasn't the best movie in the series so far, but thinks that it was better than T3 (which he "didn't really pay attention to"; he also only watched one episode of Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles. Feel free to start your fuming now), and "tried to introduce credibility" back to the franchise. And, maybe most importantly, he showed that he knows movie direction:

7:15: Here's a tip that will go down in history from one of the film greats. "There's two elements that go into filmmaking. There's sound, and there's the picture."

There's more in Jason's epic journey into one director's ego, including how McG feels about the Charlie's Angels movies these days, that Moon Bloodgood topless shot and the downbeat end to the franchise that was possible. Go read, if only because Jason suffered for us, and because he's right about Community.

Terminator Salvation BD-Live Director's Commentary Liveblog [Gizmodo]

Hollywood Parts is selling off everything from the Terminator Salvation set — and we mean everything. Even boxes of clean t-shirts. While some of the things in this list could be interesting to own, like the Terminator X-Rays, or half metal skeletons of dead terminators, much of this stuff is the worst, especially this silver platform shoe get-up that Helena must have worn when she was a floating head at the end??? This costume must be from the trashed script many moons ago — sad really, 'cause that outfit could only have spiced up this film.

[via IESB]

Speculative fiction is full of stories about people who've lost their identity – AMC just gave us a dreamlike remake of The Prisoner in which Number Six forgets who he really is, and Dollhouse returns Friday with more mind-erasing fun. But it's weird to see the trope of "fighting for selfhood" merged with that action-movie staple, the entertaining killing spree.

Recently, I was re-watching chunks of X-Men: Origins: Wolverine and thinking about that movie's insane body-count — both before and after Logan starts trying to regain his elusive humanity. In Wolverine, the mutant known as Logan is caught between his bestial nature and his dignity as an individual. For a hundred-odd years, he is a slaughter machine for the military, and then he joins a super-secret mutant taskforce. But in mid-atrocity, he suddenly starts questioning orders, and then he goes… rogue. (No, he doesn't bleach part of his hair and start talking in a Southern-girl voice. He just wanders off the reservation.)

The point is, Wolverine is just as much of a killing machine after he starts asserting that he's not just part of the machine, or not just an animal. He never makes the connection between the sacredness of his own personhood, and the sacredness of human life in general. I get that you have to fight for your freedom sometimes, but the movie makes a big point of showing Wolverine killing when he could just as easily disable his opponents — one of the movie's few great fuck-yeah moments involves cold-blooded murder. (Sure, he's killing scumbags. But he was just as much of a scumbag twenty minutes earlier.)

Likewise, Terminator Salvation (newly on DVD) gives us Sam Worthington's tormented cyborg Marcus, who discovers that he's basically a reanimated corpse with metal parts — and he makes the choice to be human, slaughtering several of John Connor's men in the process. (During his heroic escape from the resistance compound.) But it's okay, because Marcus' emergent selfhood is more important than any sense of self all of those dead people might have possessed. (Actually, I might need to — shudder — rewatch this sequence. I know a bunch of the rebels die, but some of them die due to hydrobots that attack afterwards. Does Marcus actually kill anybody directly, or just cause their deaths by tearing apart their security?)

And then, of course, there's District 9, in which Wikus also fights to regain his humanity — by putting on a battlesuit and shredding people with alien weapons. This film at least subverts this trope a bit, by having Wikus use alien weaponry that he's only able to use because he's losing his humanity — and the film doesn't exactly reward Wikus for his mass murder.

This odd combination — the hero who devalues human life in the process of exalting his own — has been around for ages, but seems to be on the rise. RoboCop and the Universal Soldier movies give us cyborg heroes who struggle to re-humanize while killing lots of other humans. Michael Bay (surprise!) gave us The Island, in which a clone grown as an organ donor kills his "original" self, along with a number of other people, on the way to becoming a full-fledged person.

For almost as long as there have been action movies, there's been the high body count: watching a Rambo movie in the 1980s, you don't stop and think that everyone of these bodies flopping to the ground is another person who won't come home to his/her family. It's one of the conventions of action movies that we accept that this carnage isn't really happening – even as the movie expects us to suspend our disbelief about a guy falling out of a helicopter on fire and surviving, it asks us to maintain full disbelief that mass murder is taking place in front of us.

On some level, too, we stop thinking that those people dying in front of us are really people – especially in a movie with tons of bad CG (like Wolverine). We can watch the corpses piling up because we know they're not human.

But the action-movie body count and the "search for identity" plot are great separately — I love a good John Woo bloodbath — but they sit uneasily together. The more people we see your cyborg or mutant kill — and the more casually they're killed — the less we can identify with our hero's quest for selfhood. The whole thing starts to feel more like a first-person shooter, and the main character more like a video-game avatar, rather than an individual who Deserves Human Rights and all that stuff.

If life is so cheap, then who really cares about Logan's quest for self? Not to pick on Wolverine, but these questions keep coming back as you watch the movie, as if they have a mutant healing factor.

How do you square the contrast, between the hero's inalienable uniqueness and everyone else's disposability? Maybe it's because Our Hero is a Nietzschean ubermensh, whose will to power makes his individuality more precious than everyone else's? What do you think?

Whether you're buying for loved ones, loathed ones, ones you barely know but feel an obligation to get something something for or yourself, it's hard to go wrong with a well-chosen toy as a gift. But it's hard to know just what toys you should be looking at, which is where we come in; we've split our choices into three categories: Play, Display and Making Your Life Better, which is to say things that are useful (or, in one case, useless but kind of essential nonetheless). Click through to see our selections.

For Play
LEGO, action figures and things for you to hit other people with safely. After all, isn't that what "play" really means?

For Display
For some people, toys are things to keep on shelves, on their walls or in boxes. Here're a few ideas for the serious collector.

For Making Your (Or Someone Else's) Life Better
In which we suggest gifts offering education, amusement and/or something to hold onto at night. Yes, even that last one.

Additional research by Alex Eichler.

Star Wars Mustafar Volcano Kit
And talking about learning, who knew that the climactic battle between Anakin Skywalker and Obi-Wan Kenobi would lead to an educational toy teaching kids how real volcanoes work and why, when you're in a life-and-death lightsaber battle with your former teacher, it's really, really stupid to let them cut your limbs off. Remember: Volcanoes + Ewan McGregor can turn you into a cyborg crybaby.

(Actually, all of the Star Wars Science toys would make perfect gifts. Especially the Force Trainer. Not that we really, really would like a Force Trainer, Hasbro. Of course not. Unless you happen to have one handy, of course.)

Alien USB With Illuminated Tongue
Yes, I know; you're all sick of the novelty USB gadgets by now, but read what this one is called again. Look at the part that says "Illuminated Tongue" and ask yourself very seriously, how have you managed to get this far in your life without one?

Terminator Salvation Fuel Cell Lighter
Some would argue that there's nothing toylike about a lighter, and normally they'd be entirely right. But this is a lighter that looks just like the nuclear fuel cell embedded in the chest of every Terminator, which practically makes it a Transformer, right? Just think of everyone you'd be able to impress by whipping this out and explaining the unnecessary story in public!

Plush Mecha Godzilla
You can't have a toy guide without at least one plush toy for you to lose your heart to and dream of snuggling up next to every night, so why not the one that is unsuited for plush toy treatment? Yes, many would've considered a robotic replica of a giant lizard that rampages throughout Tokyo toppling buildings and killing people to be an unlikely candidate for cuddly toy translation, but look at his little shiny tiny arms, those "love me" eyes and tell me that your heart doesn't melt for reasons other than his firey breath.

Whedon's open letter to Halcyon proves just why this man should be given the keys to the cyborg car:

An Open Letter to the Terminator Owners. From a Very Important Hollywood Mogul

Dear Sirs/Ma'ams,

I am Joss Whedon, the mastermind behind Titan A.E., Parenthood (not the movie) (or the new series) (or the one where 'hood' was capitalized 'cause it was a pun), and myriad other legendary tales. I have heard through the 'grapevine' that the Terminator franchise is for sale, and I am prepared to make a pre-emptive bid RIGHT NOW to wrap this dealio up. This is not a joke, this is not a scam, this is not available on TV. I will write a check TODAY for $10,000, and viola! Terminator off your hands.

No, you didn't miscount. That's four — FOUR! — zeroes after that one. That's to show you I mean business. And I mean show business. Nikki Finke says the Terminator concept is played. Well, here's what I have to say to Nikki Finke: you are a fine journalist and please don't ever notice me. The Terminator story is as formative and important in our culture — and my pretend play — as any I can think of. It's far from over. And before you Terminator-Owners (I have trouble remembering names) rush to cash that sweet cheque, let me give you a taste of what I could do with that franchise:

1) Terminator... of the Rings! Yeah, what if he time-travelled TOO far... back to when there was dragons and wizards? (I think it was the Dark Ages.) Hasta La Vista, Boramir! Cool, huh? "Now you gonna be Gandalf the Red!" RRRRIP! But then he totally helps, because he's a cyborg and he doesn't give a s#&% about the ring — it has no power over him! And he can carry it AND Frodo AND Sam AND f@%& up some orcs while he's doing it. This stuff just comes to me. I mean it. (I will also offer $10,000 for the Lord of the Rings franchise).

2) More Glau. Hey. There's a reason they're called "Summer" movies.

3) Can you say... musical? Well don't. Even I know that's an awful idea.

4) Christian Bale's John Connor will get a throat lozenge. This will also help his Batwork (ten grand for that franchise too, btw.)

5) More porn. John Connor never told Kyle Reese this, but his main objective in going to the past was to get some. What if there's a lot of future-babies that have to be made? Cue wah-wah pedal guitar — and dollar signs!

6) The movies will stop getting less cool.

Okay. There's more — this brain don't quit! (though it has occasionally been fired) — but I think you get my drift. I really believe the Terminator franchise has only begun to plumb the depths of questioning the human condition during awesome stunts, and I'd like to shepherd it through the next phase. The money is there, but more importantly, the heart is there. But more importantly, money. Think about it. End this bloody bidding war before it begins, and put the Terminator in the hands of someone who watched the first one more than any other movie in college, including "Song of Norway" (no current franchise offer).

Sincerely, Joss Whedon.

For this, Joss is forgiven all of Dollhouse.

(According to the Financial Times, real parties interested in Terminator include Sony, Twilight studio Summit Entertainment, and Media Rights Captial, the people behind Bruno. The rights will be auctioned later this month.)

An Open Letter to the Terminator Owners [Whedonesque] (Link updated, thanks all.)

So now that you've seen it, what do you think? Worth creating a huge public apocalypse and humiliating poor Moon Bloodgood over? I didn't think so either.

To refresh your memory, back in February, McG made Bloodgood stand up (fully clothed) in front of a crowd of Wondercon fans and shouted, "Who wants to see Moon's boobs?" until the crowd roared. McG explained that the studio wanted to cut Bloodgood's topless scene, to keep the movie PG-13. In the roundtables afterwards, they talked up the scene and how great it was:

Afterwards, at the roundtable, McG told us he saw Moon's breasts as expressing the human softness that's what we're fighting the machines for, and they're like the opposite of the hard machine world, but on the other hand maybe it's just a gratuitous juvenile scene that drags down an otherwise serious movie, and that's what he's debating with the studio right now. And Moon herself told reporters the scene is very tasteful and she felt very comfortable with it. And the scene is about knowing you could die soon and wanting to be close to another person, without any barriers in the way. Including clothing.

Did you get all of that from the above clip? No? Then you're obviously an ingrate, who cannot appreciate the subtleties of McG's film-making process. In any case, I'm probably the last person who would object to a little gratuitious nudity or extra trashiness — especially in an already cheesy apocalyptic film, where it mixes in with the shouting and the ridiculous stunts and the nonsensical dialogue. In fact, if Christian Bale had spent the entire movie nude, it might have been the one thing that would have salvaged his performance. But especially after having seen the rest of the film, the auteur-ish temper tantrums over this brief snippet of "Moon's boobs," and the grandiose boob exegeses seem a bit overplayed. Just a tad.

Fall is officially in full effect, which means the big bad summer sci-fi season is over! Now, personally, I set my bar so impossibly high that no film could ever come close to pleasing me unless our lord and saviour Michael Bay himself were to direct it. But perhaps some of you plebs are able to enjoy lesser entertainment - though I fail to see how you can watch anything beyond those low brows of yours. So, now that we've had a little while to absorb and reflect the entertainment we've witnessed, what really was a disaster? So, enjoy a mini "clip-show" to refresh your memory and then vote on what was truly a disaster!


WATCHMEN:



DOLLHOUSE:



TERMINATOR SALVATION:



BSG FINALE:



STAR TREK:



X-MEN ORIGINS - WOLVERINE:



TRANSFORMERS-REVENGE OF THE FALLEN:



GI JOE:



SUMMER GLAU:



DISTRICT 9:



OTHER:



Now go vote... and argue!!!

I also want to use this change in format to bring a little news. For a while now, I've been trying to bring you the best Disaster I can with the time that I have when not busy with other ventures. But, in less than two weeks, I will be welcoming a tiny disaster of my own into the world. So between that and other "official" work that I've been involved in, I will be having far less time to put together a weekly "This is a Disaster". So I am going to take a short hiatus.

I will return, I would just rather promise future greatness than deliver regular mediocrity.


I'll still be lurking around here doing the odd 'shop when time and inspiration meet. But if you want to see what work I'm up too check out my blog. I have big plans for ROACH, so continue to check there periodically. And if you are curious what the fuck I'm going to do with a baby, I just started a new blog that I will do my best to keep up with so follow along there.

Thanks for all your interest so far and I will return before you notice I'm gone.

-Garrison Dean

According to The Wrap, FTI Capital Advisors have been hired by the troubled company to "evaluate strategic alternatives" to bankruptcy, and they've already announced that things aren't as bad as they may seem, if Senior Managing Director Kevin W. Shultz is to be believed:

Based on our extensive due diligence, we believe the value of the Terminator franchise alone is substantially greater than the $30 million Halcyon paid for it in 2007. In our view, Halcyon enjoys a wide variety of strategic options and we intend to explore them all.

Amongst that wide variety is the right of refusal for any movie based on Philip K. Dick's novels. And according to Halcyon, the next Terminator movie is already in development, unaffected by the company's financial situation.

'Terminator's' Halcyon Gets Restructuring Help [The Wrap]

The Sarah Connor Chronicles went off the air last May, and seems unlikely to come back to television. But fans have become increasingly focused on the idea that the show could have a direct-to-DVD movie sequel. The show's creator and showrunner, Josh Friedman, told us back in May that the show was over, and unlikely to be revived.

But fans have kept clamoring for a direct-to-DVD continuation. So we decided to ask producer James Middleton (who also produced Terminator Salvation) if there was any hope whatsoever that fans might get their wish. Have there been any meetings about a direct-to-DVD sequel, or other continuation? Middleton responded via email:

The quick answer is, yes, there have been many discussions. I can't go into more detail about the subject until I have something truly substantial to report. What the fans should know is that I hear them and I too would love to see T:SCC come back in some form.

So it sounds like there's reason to hope after all. At least, the reference to "many discussions" sounds encouraging, as does the notion that Middleton may actually have something "substantial" to report at some point. So fingers crossed!

And here's a better look at that mobile billboard, which drove around near the Warner Bros. studio offices for three days this past week:

Here's a list of all the movies with production budgets of $170 million and over, for the past ten years. (We chose the threshold of $170 million because there were a ton of movies clustered around the $150 million-$160 million mark.) Movies that failed to make back their budget at the U.S. box office are underlined.

2009:

Harry Potter & The Half-Blood Prince: $250 million

Avatar: $237 million (according to AP)

Transformers: Revenge Of The Fallen: $225 million (according to NY Post)

Terminator Salvation: $200 million

G.I. Joe: The Rise Of COBRA: $175 million

Up: $175 million

2008:

Quantum Of Solace: $230.6 million

Prince Caspian: $225.6 million

Iron Man: 186.5 million

Indiana Jones And The Kingdom Of The Crystal Skull: $185.5 million

The Dark Knight: $185.5 million

Wall-E: $180.5 million

2007:

Pirates Of The Caribbean: At World's End: $317.4 million

Spider-Man 3: $272.9 million

The Golden Compass: His Dark Materials: $213.4 million

Rush Hour 3: $187.4 million

2006:

Superman Returns: $295.3 million

Pirates Of The Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest: $223.1 million

X-Men: The Last Stand: $209.3 million

Poseidon: $171.3 million

2005:

King Kong: $232.5 million

Chronicles Of Narnia: The Lion The Witch & The Wardrobe: $197.6 million

Sahara: $176.8 million

Harry Potter And The Goblet Of Fire: $150 million (2005 dollars)

2004:

Spider-Man 2: $232.2 million

Troy: $199.9 million

Van Helsing: $182.8 million

The Polar Express: $186.6 million

Alexander: $175.4 million

2003:

Terminator 3: $238.4 million

The Matrix: Reloaded: $176.7 million

Master And Commander: $175.6 million

The Matrix: Revolutions: $175.6 million

2000:

The Perfect Storm: $175.6 million

1999:

Wild Wild West: $221 million

The World Is Not Enough: $173.3 million

The 13th Warrior: $206.8 million

Notes: All figures are in 2009 dollars, adjusted for inflation. These figures are just production budgets, and are based on the most accurate figures we could find. They don't include marketing budgets. And of course, many of the films which failed to break even at the U.S. box office did make a profit when you factor in international box office.

Conclusions:

There hasn't been a movie as expensive as Pirates Of The Caribbean: At World's End since 2007, so you could argue that, over all, movies are not getting more expensive. However, after a few years where there were four mega-budgeted movies per year, the last two years have each seen six movies with budgets over $170 million (in inflation-adjusted dollars.) And as we mentioned above, this year had the most movies costing $200 million or more of any year, with next year likely to see even more films over $200 million.

And the listing above doesn't reflect this fact, but we also found a steep rise in the number of movies costing around $150 million every year — this seems to be the safe point for a film that is expected to do well, but may not be a blockbuster. Films like X-Men Origins: Wolverine, Batman Begins, Star Trek and many others all have production budgets in the magic $150 million zone.

At the same time, Hollywood seems slightly better at picking winners lately. We haven't had a year where most of the hugely expensive movies failed to make back their budget at the U.S. box office since 2004, when two historical epics, The Polar Expressand Van Helsing all bombed. Or 2003, when one of two Matrix sequels underperformed, along with Terminator 3 and Master And Commander.

One thing jumps out at me: There were apparently no budget busting movies in 2000, 2001 or 2002. Apparently the first X-Men movie, which came out in 2000, had a budget of only about $75 million. And the Star Wars prequels, hideous though they were, were apparently on the cheap side, costing around $120 million each (in non-adjusted dollars.)

Why would this be? Well, look at the three big-budget movies from 1999. Notice anything the three of them have in common? Hmmm... Other mega-expensive bombs in the late 1990s include Speed 2: Cruise Control, Lethal Weapon 4 and, of course, Waterworld. The only mega-budget movies to make money in the latter half of the 1990s were Armageddon and Titanic.

Sources: Know Your Money, Forbes.com, Listphobia, The Numbers, IMDB, Box Office Mojo, Wikipedia, and other sources as cited.

Star Wars: The Clone Wars - The Complete First Season Box Set
The name says it all: the entire first run of George Lucas' CGI take on what happened between Attack of The Clones and Revenge of The Sith gets a four-disc box set, complete with seven "director's cut" episodes, 22 behind-the-scenes featurettes (One for each episode), and a 64 page booklet explaining it all. If only they'd stuck the movie in there too.

Nov 10
Monsters, Inc. (BluRay Edition)
Pixar's 2001 take on the commodification of imagination - That is what it's really about, right? - gets an enormous 4-disc edition with its Blu Ray release. Expect many special features.

Up
Talking of Pixar, the movie of the summer - Go on, you can admit it now - comes out with multiple editions. There's a single disc version, a double disc DVD with commentary, alternate ending featurette and digital copy of the movie, and a four-disc Blu Ray that includes DVD and digital copies of the movie and all manner of special features (More on the marriage between Carl and Ellie!) and Making Of documentaries.

Nov 17
Farscape: The Complete Series Box Set
Yes, that would be 25 discs collecting the entirety of Rockne S O'Bannon's space opera, along with original promos, documentaries, episode commentaries, and all the other special features you'd expect from something like this.

Star Trek
JJ Abrams' Past Is Prologue bravely faces the Home Theater Frontier in a variety of formats: Bare bones single disc DVD, double disc DVD with digital copy of the movie, behind the scenes documentaries and lots of deleted scenes (including Klingons, for those who wondered where they were in the movie), and three disc Blu Ray with all of the above, plus more docs, a BD-Live link to NASA, Enterprise simulator and outtakes.

December 1
Terminator Salvation
Will it be the Director's Cut or the version released in theaters? Will that depend upon which version you pick up, DVD or Blu Ray? Will it actually be a good movie this time around? So much is still unknown about the home version of this summer's McG-director actioneer, but it's definitely coming out December 1st.

December 8
Family Guy: Something Something Dark Side
It's The Empire Strikes Back done-Family Guy style, which still freaks me out a little bit. Between this and the Robot Chicken episodes based on Star Wars, I wonder if George Lucas ever wonders whether he should be making even more royalties than he actually is?

Lost: The Complete 5th Season
A month before the show returns for its final season, I... Uh, I mean, you can start catching up and obsessively rewatching last season for clues as to where it's all going, and what Jacob was really up to all this time. A month should be long enough, right? Right?

Like the movie preview, we've split this preview into months (and, inside those months, into weekly releases), but with releases still unconfirmed and unannounced, we've pushed November and December together. Don't worry; it'll make sense when you click on the links below.

September
October
November/December

We know, we know: the Hollywood development cycle is a slow, lumbering beast. It can take anywhere from a couple years (for a "fast-track" project) to a decade for a movie to see the light of day. But given how many people were saying, this time last year, that The Dark Knight had changed everything, you'd expect there to be at least some films in development, if not in pre-production or actually filming.

And there don't seem to be any movies in "the pipeline" that seem consciously influenced by TDK. Here are a few possible contenders:

• Super-Max. Written by TDK co-writer David S. Goyer, this film has obvious elements in common with Knight. From the scraps we've gleaned, it's about the snotty trust-fund superhero Green Arrow, who gets sent to prison, probably for a crime he didn't commit. And he has to escape from the world's toughest, most advanced prison by teaming up with a host of DC Comics supervillains. Gritty dark action? Check. Moral ambiguity? Check. Heroes who cross the line? Pretty much. Too bad that every time we hear about this film, it sounds more and more like it's stuck in limbo.

• 

• Superman Returns (Again). Every time someone mentions doing another Superman movie in the wake of 2006's underwhelming Superman Returns, they say it'll feature a "dark" take on the Last Son Of Krypton, influenced by Christopher Nolan's take on Batman. Says Warner Bros. president Jeff Robinov, "We're going to go dark, to the extent that the character will allow." More recently, rumored Super-director James McTeigue said something similar. But this "darker" Man Of Steel movie is still stuck in limbo, and Warner Bros. execs told a courtroom that they don't see much box-office potential in another Superman movie. (Granted, they were trying to get out of having to pay Superman's creators' heirs tons of money for Hollywood rights.) In fact, when they talk about doing a "darker" Superman movie, it's usually said with an air of "Well, nobody really wants to make a Superman movie, but if you put a gun to our heads, we'd do a darker one." The confusing copyright situation with Superman means they have to start development on a new Superman film in the next few years, but assuming Warners gets more enthusiasm for the cinematic Man Of Steel again, they'll probably rediscover their love for his fun, escapist side.
• 
  
  
• The Fantastic Four. News sites started claiming last spring that Fox was considering rebooting this super-family series as a darker, "less bubble-gum" version. And now, just the other day, Fox announced it was definitely rebooting the Fantastic Four. On the other hand, they tapped the decidedly non-dark Akiva Goldsman (Batman And Robin, I Am Legend) to produce the new movie, and
  Michael Greene, writer for Smallville, Heroes and the upcoming Green Lantern movie, will write the script. I am having a hard time imagining that team creating a "dark" FF movie. Plus everyone assumes Fox's sudden interest in moving forward with Reed Richards & Co. was motivated by Disney's purchase of Marvel, and the fact that Disney reportedly wants to take back all of the Marvel properties' movie rights as soon as outside deals expire. If Fox wants to impress Disney, a misguided "dark" Fantastic Four doesn't seem a likely approach.
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• Shazam. It's hard to believe, but yes, they were talking about a dark Shazam movie in the wake of The Dark Knight. This is the story of a little boy who discovers a magic cave full of statues of the Deadly Sins, plus an old wizard who teaches him a magic world that will transform him into a big galoot whose nickname is The Big Red Cheese. And then he fights an evil mad-science worm with the help of a talking tiger. Actually, screenwriter John August and director Peter Segal wanted to do a fun, upbeat take on Shazam, but Warner Bros. wanted something more like The Dark Knight. So August rewrote his fun script to make it darker:

  This wasn't "Big, with super powers" anymore. It was Black Adam versus Captain Marvel, with a considerable push into dark territory and liminal badlands like Nanda Parbat. It wasn't the action-comedy I'd signed on to write, but it was a movie I could envision getting made.

  But then Warners pulled the plug on the Shazam movie altogether — remember how I said the enthusiasm for "dark" stories often seems to coincide with a lack of enthusiasm for making the movies at all? And now Shazam is back on track, with Bill Birch writing and comics scribe Geoff Johns pitching in. Says Variety, "The studio is now looking to go back to the original DC Comics source material for inspiration." Going back to the original comics source material is slang for "not fucking it up with a dark reimagining."

So what happened? There are a few theories.

Watchmen happened. You could argue that The Dark Knight changed everything, and then Watchmen changed it all back. Zack Snyder's movie version of Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons' classic graphic novel was everything the studios were saying they wanted: dark, controversial, morally gray, challenging — and it didn't resonate that well with audiences. It had a so-so opening weekend, followed by a steep drop-off. (Sample headline from the L.A. Times: "Watchmen is going largely unwatched.")

Another "dark" movie that came out this summer, Terminator Salvation, did similarly badly. (It wasn't strictly a superhero film, but it had superhero-ish themes, and starred Bruce Wayne himself, Christian Bale.) And while Frank Miller's The Spirit was more goofy than dark, it did have a noir-ish look to it and was the handiwork of the original "Dark Knight" reinventer.

Meanwhile, movies like G.I. Joe and Wolverine, which were fluffy and bubbly and only challenged you to avoid giggling at their ridiculous dialogue and acting, did great. Audiences didn't suddenly stop liking braindead fun just because they liked one smart, bleak movie.

Also, the economy happened. Suddenly, people were hurting and depressed, and there were a spate of news stories saying that people in an economic shitstorm want upbeat, happy films. They want escapism and a pick-me-up, not a dreadful reminder that life is full of no-win situations and suffering. Whether that theory is true or not, it's one that seems to have a lot of currency in Hollywood.

And finally, looking back through those articles where execs are saying "I want a dark Shazam! I want a dark Dazzler! America needs a dark Howard The Duck!", I can't help noticing that this is usually accompanied by a lack of enthusiasm for whatever superheroic properties they're discussing. Sure, superheroes are big right now, but not every superhero movie is a huge hit, and characters like Superman and the Fantastic Four have fallen squarely into the second or third tier of big-screen spandex-flexers in the past decade or so.

Execs cast about for ways to make those lame fillies run again, and the "dark" thing is one of the ideas they hit on. But at this point, nobody seems to think "dark" is a cure-all for tired superheroes. At least, let's hope not.

UGO noticed that a recent email from the MPAA listed the DVD release of the movie as being rated R, with a note that "content is different from PG-13 version" (The R rating comes because of "some violence and brief nudity," apparently). McG had claimed the only stuff that got cut to make the movie PG-13 were a glimpse of Moon Bloodgood's breasts, and one brief moment of violence.

Whether or not this Director's Cut version will be make the movie any better is, of course, unknown at this time. But since the theatrical release seemed weirdly edited — as if some important scenes were either cut altogether or trimmed severely — it seems at least plausible that a longer DVD version might make a bit more sense. Here's hoping, anyway.

Terminator Salvation Was Rated R After All [UGO]

You've probably already heard about the lawsuit and the bankruptcy filing — but we've read the legal filings, and we have some more info about the tangled web below. The most important question for movie-lovers, however, is: Does this mean Terminator 5 (and 6) are doomed? Will the legal battles and money disputes keep the movie rights tied up indefinitely?

People familiar with the lawsuits tell io9 that Terminator 5 will definitely still happen — although different sources disagree about how long it'll take. But sources seem to agree that Terminator Salvation made too much money ($371 million worldwide, according to Box Office Mojo) for anyone to stand in the way of a fifth outing.

"Terminator 4 was a big hit, and everybody who was connected with that movie was pretty happy with it, and the're looking forward to a Terminator 5 and a Terminator 6 down the road," says a source familiar with Halcyon. All that needs to happen is for Halcyon to get rid of some liens that its financing company put on its assets (see below) and the company will move forward. (The holding company only filed for Chapter 11, or restructuring, bankruptcy.) Even though Terminator Salvation was more expensive than anticipated — something Halcyon blames on Pacificor — it still made a healthy profit.

Another source familiar with the case agrees, but says that the courts may have to get involved in the question of who owns the Terminator movie rights, and that may take some time. At the end of the day, someone will emerge holding those rights, and that someone will be highly motivated to put together another installment — but it may or may not be Halcyon co-founders Victor Kubicek and Derek Anderson.

So how did we reach this apocalyptic legal scenario?

The Terminator movie rights are at the center of a massive power struggle between the producers of Terminator 4 and their financial backers, and the allegations are already flying like a squad of Hunter-Killers. We read the filings that Halcyon Co. put forth in their lawsuit against their financing company (Pacificor) and one exec in particular, Kurt Benjamin, and it reads like a thriller, with deception, double-crosses, deadly plane crashes and ticking clocks.

In a nutshell, Halcyon got wind of an opportunity to buy the Terminator franchise in 2006, but to do this they needed to raise cash in a hurry. Halcyon co-founders Victor Kubicek and Derek Anderson met up with Kurt Benjamin, who helped raise money from Pacificor. But in their lawsuit, Halcyon claims that Benjamin never revealed that he was an employee of Pacificor. So Halcyon allegedly gave inside information to Benjamin — including the fact that they were desperate to raise money in time to buy the Terminator rights — and then Benjamin turned around and gave that info to Pacificor. That inside info allegedly allowed Pacificor to strong-arm Halcyon into agreeing to tougher loan terms.

Later, Benjamin allegedly used his inside info about Halcyon to extort a salary out of the company, driving it deeper into debt and forcing it to seek a second loan from Pacificor at tougher terms. After Pacificor's founder died in a plane crash, Halcyon allegedly became even more dependent on Benjamin to negotiate continuing finance from Pacificor, because Benjamin claimed nobody else at Pacificor even knew about the Terminator deal. Halcyon claims it was left with no choice but to pay up Benjamin's alleged "blackmail," which added to its debt load — at one point, Halcyon claims that it worried it would run out of money a scant few months before T4 was due to come out.

The upshot of all this is that Halcyon is apparently deeper in debt to Pacificor than the Terminator producers had bargained on. And according to their legal filings, Pacificor put a lien on all their assets "in a deliberate and desperate attempt to seize control and ownership of the Halcyon entities and the [Terminator] franchise," and to keep Halcyon from paying off its creditors. "As a result of the Lien, Halcyon has been unable to obtain financing that would enable [it] to meet its obligations, which could potentially result in Halcyon's loss of the [Terminator] Franchise."

A spokesperson for Halcyon declined to comment on pending litigation.

But Benjamin, the main defendant in one of Halcyon's two legal actions, tells io9 "everything that's alleged in their lawsuit, every allegation, is a lie." He adds: "This is just salacious creative writing, and I highly recomend that they and their lawyers work more on writing science fiction."

Both the Halcyon co-founders and their attorney knew all along that Benjamin worked for Pacificor, he claims. And far from acting as a go-between in the lending negotiations between Pacificor and Halcyon, Benjamin says he had no part in the discussions once he introduced the two parties. And after Pacificor's founder was killed in that plane crash, Anderson and Kubicek "coerced me to work with them," says Benjamin. Benjamin claims he wasn't even drawing a salary from Pacificor — he was just paid on commission for any deals he set up, which means his first paycheck didn't even materialize until January 2008.

And the reason why Terminator Salvation wound up costing more than expected, according to Benjamin? Producers Anderson and Kubicek wasted the money on personal expenses. "They're known in most Hollywood circles as the glitter twins," claims Benjamin. "The minute these guys got the funding, they went on wild spending sprees."

Nikki Finke broke the news that T Asset Acquisition, LLC, "and related entities that own the rights to the Terminator movie franchise" filed for Chapter 11 on Monday afternoon in Los Angeles, announcing that

[t]he companies will seek to restructure their financial obligations and resolve related litigation and other matters and emerge from Chapter 11 later this year or early in 2010.

According to the New York Times, T Asset Acquisition is a subsidiary of Halcyon, so it's no stretch to assume that the "related litigation" refers to the lawsuits against Pacificor and former Pacificor employee Kurt Benjamin.

Up for grabs in the current legal warfare are the rights to the Terminator franchise, which Halcyon could lose to Pacificor due to bad debt. Considering that it's less than six months ago that Halcyon owners Derek Anderson and Victor Kubicek were being accused of stealing the rights themselves (the suit was settled out of court in April), there's some kind of irony at play here...

'Terminator' Owners File For Chapter 11 [Deadline Hollywood Daily]