I can feel it, you guys, I think this is the year Dreamworks finally catches up with Pixar.  Attach a stupid cotton thing to my pen, Hollywood Reporter:

The Good Luck Trolls, with their frizzy, pastel-colored hair, are coming to the big screen via DreamWorks Animation. The company behind the “Shrek” franchise said Tuesday it has pacted with Denmark’s Dam Things, which controls the toy line, to develop an animated feature. Siblings Adam Wilson and Melanie Wilson LaBracio will write the screenplay.

Touché, Dreamworks, touché.  Capitalizing on a current trend like Troll dolls is going to be a tough act to follow.  Your move, Pixar.  I can see it now, Pixar’s The Pog That Pokémoned, coming soon to 3D and slap bracelet.

Aside from teaching children that sentences that end in prepositions and don’t have any verbs are the hip thing to do (if Dreamworks jumped off a cliff, would you?), Dreamworks has provided yet another example of “the Dreamworks face.”  At this point, you wonder if they’re aware of people making fun of them for this and don’t care, or if they actually are embarrassed, but it’s just too expensive to try to go back and change the Dreamworks-character-face template as drawn by Anheiser P. Dreamworks III back in 1856.  At least this much is certain: Shrek Forever After is about witches.  Witches with troll-doll hair.  Okay.

[via IMPA, thanks to Patrick for the tip]

"Tom, you have my word. There are no gays in there."

Former Variety writer Nicole LaPorte wrote a book about Dreamworks coming out next month, and while Spielberg’s reps deny it, she claims “his passion for secrecy sometimes suggests a burgeoning near-paranoia.”  Boy is that a long way of saying that.  To keep you from having to read her whole book, the Post breaks her claims into handy bullet points.

• Steven Spielberg is so paranoid about security at his office, he keeps a never-used motorcycle permanently parked outside in case he needs to make a getaway [like Shia LaBeouf!].
• “In Spielberg’s office, hanging above his desk, a plexiglass half-moon keeps sound from reverberating so that his phone conversations remain ultra-confidential. When an assistant once asked what the funny thing over Spielberg’s desk was, a security guard referred to it as a ‘dome of silence.’ “
• “Every document that leaves the office — a script, development report, even a memo — is coded, so that should it somehow get into the wrong hands . . . the person responsible for the breach can be identified.” [Ed. Note: I have an independent source who confirms this is true, though it's not all that unusual]
• “When Spielberg isn’t at [his office], live-cam images are streamed to his home. There are also measures to protect against earthquakes or attacks, as Spielberg believes in being prepared . . . At one point, employees were given survival kits including gas masks and other amenities.” [NYPost]

True or not, /Film points out that Spielberg was the target of a bizarre kidnapping plot in 1998, and a break in in 2007, in which a thief tried to sell stolen documents.  Meanwhile, National Geographic reports that George Lucas is so paranoid about missing food, he keeps a dome-shaped sack made of flesh underneath his chin to filter cat particles out of the air.

Yahoo just released the teaser trailer for the animated family film Megamind, starring the voice of Will Ferrell, which you can watch under the cut.  You can tell it’s a Dreamworks movie because the main character makes the Dreamworks face like five times.  And much like their Dragon movie that used the music from True Romance, they’ve gone with another possibly inappropriate soundtrack for a kids’ movie, this time AC/DC’s “Highway to Hell.”  They never actually let it get to the chorus, but still, I think the danger would be moms hearing it, forgetting themselves, and flashing their tits at the screen, or dads lighting their seats on fire and screaming about sex, drugs, and groupie pussy.   Which is what my parents always did when AC/DC came on.

Read the rest of this entry »

*removes sweatpants, puts on reporter mask*

I have it on good authority that Dreamworks is in negotiations with relative unknown Alex Pettyfer to star in I Am Number Four, the Michael-Bay-produced, DJ-Caruso-directed, James-Frey-written, aliens-in-high-school movie.  I also hear that the studio wants Kevin Bacon or Gary Oldman to play the father, but haven’t made any offers yet.  This was the original Variety description:

“The story is about a group of nine children from a planet called Lorien who have been attacked by a hostile race from another planet. The nine and their guardians evacuate to earth, where three are killed. The protagonist, a Lorien boy named John Smith, hides in Paradise, Ohio, as a human and tries to evade his predators.” [Variety]

I know this probably wasn’t the most interesting story, I just thought that if I knew something other people didn’t I should make a big deal about it, because bloggers are supposed to do that.  In any case, I apologize.  Please accept this picture of Abe Lincoln with a boombox as a token of my appreciation.  In related news, I want to adopt this puppy and name it “Alex Prettyfur”.