Adaptations

Fox Is Allowed to Press Warner Over Rights to ‘Watchmen.’ Uh-oh.

Sam Raimi is putting together an adaptation of Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips’ graphic novel Sleeper for Warner Brothers. About an operative who’s fused with an alien artifact that goes undercover into a villainous organization, it’ll star Tom Cruise (at least he’s in on it this week).

Henry Selick on the Coraline movie, "We will complete animation on Coraline in about six weeks and plan a February release of 2009."

Nicholas Cage has signed onto Matthew Vaughn’s Kick Ass movie.

Alex Proyas will write and direct, and Pheonix Pictures will produce, an adaptation of Robert Heinlein’s 1942 novella The Unpleasant Profession of Jonathan Hoag. It’s about “a man who becomes increasingly disturbed when he realizes he cannot account for his activities during the day or even what he does for a living. He divulges his problem to the husband-and-wife partners of a private detective agency, and their investigation leads to a series of revelations they could never have imagined.”

New Regency has dropped the Voltron movie (the one that would turn the ‘80s cartoon into a story about five post apocalyptic alien attack survivors piloting lion robots in New York and Mexico) with Relativity Media in negotiations to pick it up. If it goes through, there will be a new director with a smaller budget, most likely by using 300-esque technology. Relativity would produce and then farm out distribution.

He-Man screenwriter Justin Marks: “The script is very true to the characters — we’re not talking about putting nipples on the Trapjaw suit. But we had to come up with a reason again why Trapjaw would actually not just be something that’s totally absurd, but why he would need those bionic parts added to him. Which gives a sort of sense of where [the movie] is going in some way.”

Fox Searchlight has put The Sweeney on hold. The movie based on the ‘70s British cult cop show was supposed to start filming in a couple weeks, with Ray Winstone and Michael Fassbender (he’s great, keep an eye on him) being considered for the leads. But Searchlight and DNA Films decided they needed bigger names in order to bring in audiences outside the UK. Nick Love remains attached to direct while they hope to get bigger names and go into production next year.

The Veronica Mars movie isn’t dead.