Incredible Hulk Rewritten By... Edward Norton?

According to SlashFilm, who might just have misheard this, Edward Norton wrote the script for The Incredible Hulk. I'm assuming this was a rewrite of Zak Penn's draft - if indeed, it happened at all. Across a crowded Comic-Con hall, amongst all of the hoo-ha, perhaps 'read' just sounded too much like 'wrote'? Or was it just a joke gone awry?

It's hard not to like Norton, to love him, even, but he certainly makes some odd choices from time to time. He's in plenty of bad films, and he's fought plenty of battles I, personally, would have taken the other side in, but he has strong beliefs, there's no doubt of that.

This face-paced new Hulk film apparently has a new take on the Hulk's origin, not upfront int he plot but 'unspooled' throughout the narrative. Interesting.

Edward Norton vs. Tim Roth. I can think of countless more appealing ways to stage that face-off, but I'll settle for a Hulk film, for now.

Movie Minesweeper - The Bad Punting Edition

I can't punt. I've been listening to Kodachrome by Paul Simon. Again.

- Chud have come out and reported that Billy Crudup will be Dr. Manhattan in Watchmen. Suits me.

- More Comic-Con details are out.

- A Hulk casting call has revealed that - surprise, surprise - there will be soldiers in the film.

- What is Indiana Jones looking for this time? Aint It Cool have a very interesting theory. I hope it's true, and I expect it is.

- Neil Gaiman linked to a piece on Travis Knight, the lead animator on Coraline. It confirms that the film is being shot digitally and in stereo vision. I love 3D.

- Aisha Tyler has joined Karl Urban and Larry Fishburne in the cast of Tony Kaye's Black Water Transit. Come on Tony: I'm rooting for you.

- David Morell's novel The Brotherhood of the Rose has been optioned by Warner Bros.

- Variety have today given Trailers form Hell some kind of official launch - months after I first linked to it. As well as (my favourites) Joe Dante and John Landis performing commentary tracks for exploitation trailers, the site now features the more-readily hip Edgar Wright and eternally unhip Mary Lambert.

- The Swing Vote cast has been rounded out to include Dennis Hopper, Kevin Costner, Nathan Lane, Kelsey Grammer, Stanley Tucci, George Lopez and Madeline Carroll. The stars is out (and so is Madeline Carroll).

And I need to take a breather, so I'm publishing this and coming right back with another heavy load.

Oh - and if you're interested, I'm listening to all of Tapestry by Carole King. Best. Album. Ever.

Where The Toy Things Are

The first image from Where the Wild Things Are has popped up online and, yep, it looks really quite exciting indeed. I've popped it below with more snaps from the New York Toyfare. There's Beowulf and the Hulk's silhouette, and if you go over to the coverage at Wizard, you can see plenty more - including well distributed, much discussed, boring snaps of vehicles from The Dark Knight and Speed Racer. Yawn.

But this Wild Things image. Now. There's something, eh?

Movie Minesweeper - The Too Early Edition

- Aint it Cool have some new Transformers posters. They are, essentially, close ups of robot faces.

- A basic outline of the next Hulk film has appeared online.

- Alex Cox has written a piece for The Guardian about film stars turned directors. He doesn't think this can lead to success - and, of course, he doesn't mention Robert Redford anywhere in the piece. Quiz Show alone is living proof that Cox's argument won't stand. He also tears into One Eyed Jacks which is, in fact, really very good indeed. Even Ken Branagh has proven himself to be Cox's equal, if not superior, as a director. And don't get me started on Alex Cox's attempts to act...

- America Olivo is to appear in Iron Man as 'Dubai Beauty' - she says so on her official site. But... who is America Olivo anyway?

- Peter Jackson does a good job of making Halo sound dead but The Dambusters sound great in a new interview.

- Dana Gould's The Last Larry sounds a wee bit like Shaun of the Dead: the Series. More promisingly, he's writing Alternadad about a father trying to stay hip and cool in the eyes of his kids.

- New EU rules might curb the import of some American shows because they're simply too laden with product placement.

- Scorsese seems to be gearing up to shoot Silence in Japan.

- Stephen Susco has found a 'awesome' spoof of The Grudge, perhaps two and a half months too late.

- Two clips from Hostel 2 are up on the MTV Movies Blog, so if you're in the US, you can watch them... me... I just have to imagine. [EDIT: BllodyDisgusting have seven clips, and I can see those ones. Do they include the two MTV snippets?]

- Also at MTV, Daniel Wilson discusses Bro-jitsu.

- Joe Kosinski looks set to direct Logans Run. Bryan Singer has better things to do now, I suppose, than argue with Joel Silver. Previously, Kosinski has directed cut-scenes for video games, including Gears of War. I've seen those ones and... well, I'm not excited about this decision, I can tell you. But then, see... with Joel Silver calling the shots, what was I to expect?

- TVSquad have plenty of info on Heroes season 2. You might even call these bits and pieces spoilers, if you're delicate about that kind of thing.

- The lastest Sound of Young America is an interview with Marty Kroft. It's confirmed that Land of the Lost doesn't yet have a director attached, though Will Ferrel has definitely been cast.

Stewart Lee In The Incredible Hulk

Stewart Lee is one of the best stand-up comedians in the UK - and he's also something of a Hulk fan. In fact, he's got a whole brilliant, brilliant routine about The Hulk, and his meeting with Ang Lee, which you can view on YouTube now.

More recently, Lee (Stewart, not Ang) made a sly cameo in The Incredible Hulk - the comic, not the upcoming film. See if you can spot him in the image below or if, alternatively, you are completely blind.

Tim Roth Is An Abomination

The odd casting continues: after Edward Norton as Bruce Banner and Liv Tyler as Betty Ross, Tim Roth has now been cast as Emil Blonsky in the next Hulk film.

Blonsky's alter-ego is Abomination, a kind of bigger, badder Hulk that never gets to change back to his milder, meeker form (the dynamic isn't entirely unlike that between Spider-Man and Venom). In the comics, he was a KGB agent but I'm expecting that has been changed... anybody out there got a Hulk script I can fact check this against?

The Hulk Is Going To Be Green

Avi Arad has told Empire what the sensible suspected all along: the next Hulk is going to be green. film ick didn't touch those grey Hulk stories last week because it was obvious they'd crumble soon enough.

And now they have.

The Hulk simply has to be green. This film needs to appeal to a massive audience, and in the mainstream pop-mind, he's pretty darn green, so there was no way grey would ever happen. The pop-mind holds great sway over pretty much every choice in these matters... and that includes Galactus, the lips of Transformers and organic web shooters.

Marvel-ous Sega, Wright Gone Wrong?

Marvel and Sega have inked deals for videogame spin-offs of several upcoming Marvel movies. The games will be released day-and-date with the films.

The deal now includes Iron Man, The Incredible Hulk, Captain America and Thor. Should the greenlight never come for the Captain or the Norse God, the games will, apparently, still go ahead.

Rights to Avengers, Nick Fury and Ant Man films haven't been inked yet - which suggests Thor and Captain America are higher priority movies for Marvel right now. I fear we may never get to see Edgar Wright's Ant Man movie, this perhaps stokes the flames of that fear.

Will Wright's next film be his reteaming with Pegg and Frost? Will it be Scott Pilgrim? Them? Something completely different? Perhaps the box office for Hot Fuzz in the US this weekend will decide.

Edward Norton Blah Blah Hulk Blah Blah Reboot Blah Blah Blah

In case you're one of my family or close friends who live under a rock and haven't looked at any other entertainment website at all today, Edward Norton has been cast as Bruce Banner in the next Hulk film.

The new Hulk film is inevitably going to be better than the previous one, but I wouldn't expect much from it at the box office.

Ang Lee's monster mess was an insult to the very language of comics. He made these vague pretensions towards incorporating what he saw as comic book grammar into the film by featuring split screen effects, but of course, this removed the basic language of film even further from the language of comicbook storytelling. Simply put: comic panels aren't simultaneous; the passage from one to the next is an indication of the passage of time. Just like the flow of normal, single-screened shots in a normal film. The split screen goofery smacked of intense arrogance and ignorance on Lee's part.

For a good taste of how the language of comics would appear on screen if filmed, the opening sequence of American Splendor offers up some clear possibilities. Of course, the languages are different enough that moving images can never truly match still ones.

Grind House 2

So, what are going to be the films to make up the second Grind House double feature?

Talking to VH1, Eli Roth discusses Thanksgiving:

The trailer was so much fun. It's all gore and nudity. It's all money shots, bodies being chopped up and people being stabbed and cheerleaders stripping on trampolines. It's three minutes of pure happiness. The feature will never live up to the trailer unless we just do 90 minutes of that. For Grind House 2 I think there's a very strong chance of shooting it. Quentin and Robert and the Weinstein Company love the trailer so much they're already asking me, "Where's the script for Thanksgiving?"

(He also suggests he turned down Die Hard 4, The Hulk and Halo to make Hostel 2)

And, in another chat, Tarantino spells out his plans for the future:

There's all these subgenres in exploitation movies and cinema in general that we like, and this gives us a license to explore them all ... I do have an idea in my mind for an old-school kung-fu movie that would be shot in Mandarin ... there would be a long version of it, with subtitles and all serious. Then I would cut another version way down, like they did in America, and dub it! Not to make it look silly, but you can't help but benefit from its humorous quality.

If the audience screams for Thanksgiving and Don't! or Werewolf Women of the S.S., and Rob, Edgar and Eli want to do it, we're all down.

And the then confirms, once more, that his next film will be Inglorious Bastards.