Richard Kelly's 2009 thriller the Box failed the biggest of ways. It was a commercial and critical flop and continued to make Donnie Darko seem like an aberration. It also failed in the smallest. Check them out.

· Variety reports: "DreamWorks has fashioned a first-look deal for 'Sex and the City' writer-director-producer Michael Patrick King. The deal gives the studio first-look at King's next film project." Is that how those work? We always thought it just meant he gets to keep whichever outfit he wears out of the Barneys dressing room first. [Variety]
· Jon Cryer, William H. Macy, Leslie Mann and James Spader will star in Robert Rodriguez's family comedy Shorts, about a suburb thrown into chaos when an 11-year-old boy is "hit in the head with a rainbow-colored rock that grants wishes to anyone who holds it." [Variety]
· How I Met Your Mother showrunner Greg Malins signed a two-year, mid-sevens deal with Fox, the direct result of Malins having been hit in the head with a rainbow-colored rock that grants wishes to anyone who holds it. [Variety]
· British TV buyers left L.A. without committing to anything, noting, "Blimey! They've repackaged all the programmes we already got on the telly! Life On Mars? Bollocks." [Variety]
· Donnie Darko SequelWatch: Shut The Fuck Up and Dance host Elizabeth Berkley has signed on to play a "speed freak-turned-Jesus freak" in the blaspheming second chapter of the beloved cult classic, sure to bring down a rain of passenger jet engines upon the homes of all involved. [THR]

A particularly virile, voracious flock of vultures is apparently en route to Cannes, where next week we're told they plan to pre-sell territories to a sequel to Richard Kelly's revelatory 2001 cult classic Donnie Darko. Leading the charge are the sick, sick fuckers at Velvet Octopus, a UK-based sales agency/Faustian hellhole where ideas go to be tortured, mutilated, disemboweled and beheaded in return for an advance against foreign box office.

On "Donnie Darko" director Richard Kelly's latest film, "Southland Tales": "Characters are as apt to quote Marx and the New Testament as they are to recite lyrics by Jane's Addiction, whose song 'Three Days' is prominently featured. The music is as lovingly chosen as the '80s staples in 'Donnie Darko.' In a druggy fantasy sequence Mr. Timberlake's character, a disfigured war veteran, sneering and clutching a can of Budweiser, lip-syncs to the Killers' "All These Things That I've Done.' 'I heard that song and couldn't stop thinking about Iraq,' Mr. Kelly said." [NYT]