We're Rebooting the World!
Limping back from summer vacation, plumes of smoke hanging over Burbank, Hollywood may be in flames, but for Hollywood the Land of Dreams, nothing gets the brain churning again like erasing the past and starting afresh.
Take notes, Barack Obama. You think a health care do-over is so hard? Hollywood is here to show you that you can press that reset button any old time, and just like that, it's like a bitter past of faltering ratings or uninspired remakes never happened.
Fox to reboot Fantastic Four: Sure the film series is only a decade or so old, but ten years ago Miley Cyrus wasn't even, like, born. On the heels of Disney's Marvel acquisition, Variety's Mike Fleming notes, "one thing to remember about Marvel assets is, they don't seem to wear out. We're about to see the second example where successful Marvel movie franchises are going to be reinvented." Over at Sony, bosses had already given the green light to tearing up every trace of the Sam Rami-helmed Spiderman franchise and starting anew. How much you want to bet Spidey 2.0's twitters? [Var]
Academy reinvents Best Picture voting: The Wrap's Steve Pond broke the news that even more changes are afoot in the Oscar Best Picture race. Following on the heels of expanding the list of Best Picture nominees from five to ten films, the Academy will now introduce preferential voting, in which members don't simply choose their favorite film but rank their picks one through ten. The idea is that in a ten field race, preferential voting would prevent a film winning with a mere eleven percent of the vote. As to whether this actually means that the actual best film of 2009 will have any chance of winning instead of some overwrought middle-of-the-road, message film, Oscar could not be reached for comment. [The Wrap]
Teen Wolf lives: Once you start re-booting, it's hard to know where to stop. MTV has ordered up a pilot presentation of the 80's classic. [THR]
2009 is #1!: With a week still to go, this year just became the highest grossing summer for domestic box office with 4.17 billion in receipts to date, smashing through 2007's paltry 4.16 billion. Transformers 2 led the team with 399 million. [Var]
Marvel's mogul maniac: Who is the masked man behind the Marvel/Disney deal? The Daily Beast's Kim Masters has a fascinating profile, including the tale how the man no one had ever heard of found it necessary to attend the premiere of Iron Man in a fake moustache. [TDB]
Marvel reax mania!: The web is still aflutter with reaction to yesterday's big news. Read the tea leaves with industry punditry all-stars Nikki Finke, David Poland, Patrick Goldstein, Sharon Waxman and Steven Zeitchik.