The REEL Addict 

Star Trek gets beamed away to May 2009
The upcoming re-tooling of Star Trek by wunderkind J.J. Abrams (I love the guy, but is it just me, or does it seem like he’s veering on overexposure and overhype?) has been officially pushed back from a December 25th, 2008, release date, to May 8th of the following year. Though officially the reason for the push is schedule re-shifting now that the writer’s strike is over, frankly it seems more likely that it was pushed because – unless you’re Lord of the Rings – Christmas time is not nearly as good of a time to make money as May (the beginning of the summer blockbuster season) is. Besides, Star Trek doesn’t really scream Christmas. An unemotional, overly rational stick-in-the-mud like Spock would just go around explaining to kids why it’s not logically possible for Santa Clause to exist, and Kirk would in the mean time try and seduce the children’s mothers.
Source: Variety

If Catholics were mad about The Golden Compass, wait till they get wind of this …
What pops out at me with this bit of news is not so much the casting of Paul Bettany, but the premise of the movie Legion he’s signed on for. The basic synopsis according to Variety is as follows: “[The] Story follows what happens when God loses faith in humanity and sends his legion of angels to wipe out the human race for the second time. Mankind’s only hope lies in a group of misfits holed up in a diner in the desert who are aided by the archangel Michael (Bettany).” I’m not sure what’s crazier here. That God thinks we’re so bad that we’re better off just dead? That instead of just ending all of our existences in an instant, he’s going to call down his army of angels to painfully slaughter us all (incidentally, I am going to presume his reason for losing faith in us is because of all our warring, so then how is declaring war on us really any better?) What about the notion that somehow a few people in a diner can not only take on that army, but basically God himself? Actually, that’s the craziest part of this film: it makes God the cliché Hollywood blockbuster villain. If anyone involved in this project is Catholic, they should probably prepare to be excommunicated (does the Catholic Church still do that?)
Source: Variety

Did studio do a survey at some point that determined movies with colons or more than three words in their titles somehow end up grossing more?
While reading about recent casting in the new Terminator movie, I came across something interesting. Now, I obviously heard the big news about Christian Bale being cast in the new Terminator movie, but somehow I completely missed the fact that it had been given the horrible title of Terminator Salvation: The Future Begins. There seems to be this awful trend in Hollywood lately to make their titles as long as possible, and throw in as many colons as they can. In my day titles like that were usually cheesy direct-to-video B-movies. I mean, for example, the new Mummy film is actually called, The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor. What happened to good old fashioned numbers for sequels? Or titles that are short enough that you don’t need a table of contents to get to the important part? At least I’m not alone in my complaint, as you can see here. In all seriousness though, I would actually love to hear some Hollywood executive explain why they’re doing this so much lately.