Tim Burton first remade the 1968 Charlton Heston classic Planet of the Apes back in 2001, to disastrous results. But this is Hollywood.  You can’t very well leave a 40-year-old idea to wither on the vine!  So now we’ve got a prequel (EVERYONE LOVES PREQUELS!) from 20th Century Fox.  The idea came from a script by Scott Frank (Minority Report, Out of Sight), first called Caesar, which was re-written by The Relic writers Amanda Silver and Rick Jaffa and retitled Rise of the Apes, which was later changed to Rise of Planet of the Apes.  Because making sense be damned, we’ve gotta ride this wave of Planet of the Apes nostalgia! The story deals with a handsome scientist’s efforts to cure Alzheimer’s, inadvertently creating a race of super-intelligent apes in the process. Now the trailer’s here, starring James Franco in a Rupert Wyatt film, though WETA, the visual effects company, actually gets top billing.

The trailer is after the jump.  And as you may have noticed in the banner image, I’ve made an important discovery vis a vis James Franco: the way he delivers eighty percent of his lines with his eyes closed makes him look like a doo wop singer.
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After the last Wolverine movie, the idea that Darren Aronofsky would be directing the follow-up was the only reason anyone had any interest in it.  Today, Fox issued a statement saying Aronofsky had left the project, effectively killing anyone’s hopes for it, and certainly squashing any possibility of it having some lipstick lesbo scissor action. (*sadly pours 40 out on copy of Jugs magazine*)

In a statement issued by the studio, Aronofsky said, “It became clear that the production of The Wolverine would keep me out of the country for almost a year. I was not comfortable being away from my family for that length of time.” (The film was reportedly going to be set in Japan.) “I am sad that I won’t be able to see the project through,” continued Aronofsky, “as it is a terrific script [by Chris McQuarrie] and I was very much looking forward to working with my friend, Hugh Jackman, again.” [EW]

Translation: “I was totally down to make a few million for slapping my name on your dumb sequel, but not if it means spending a year in a radioactive f*ckpillow swamp.”

Somewhere, Brett Ratner stares at his phone, thoughtfully eating a hot pocket.

See this picture?  It’s a still from Atari’s Missile Command.  The object of this game is to use your blue dong thingie (bottom) to shoot the red dong thingies (top) before they destroy your cities.  Can you imagine trying to write a whole screenplay from this scenario? (And you can’t just steal the blue dong stuff from Watchmen, that’s cheating).  That’s the challenge for writers Burk Sharpless and Matt Sazama, who’ve been hired to write a Missile Command movie, and it sounds much harder than what that Buried douche was working with.  Well, more pointless anyway.

Atari has set up its “Missile Command” at 20th Century Fox. Sharpless and Sazama are set to adapt. The scribes have little to adapt beyond a title to build a plot around and a Cold War-heavy scenario of players having to defend their cities from being destroyed by a rain of missiles. Game celebrated its 30th anniversary last year.

Game is the third top title that Atari has set up as a film property, after Universal Pictures acquired “Asteroids” and Sony Pictures Animation picked up “Rollercoaster Tycoon.” It also becomes the latest brand from the ’80s to get the bigscreen treatment, with Universal readying a number of toy-based properties from Hasbro, including “Battleship,” and Mattel having set up others, including “He-Man and the Masters of the Universe” at Sony and “View-Master” at DreamWorks. [Variety]

My God, this could be the next Prince of Persia, or Max Payne!  Either way, it’s sure to enjoy a high level of name recognition among people too old to care about a movie about missile fights.  Sounds like a win-win.

According to a Hollywood Reporter story, “Twentieth Century Fox is taking aggressive steps to keep its movie and TV scripts off of the Internet.”  The complaint in question is a suit against Patricia McIlvaine, a Long Island woman who posted approximately 100 scripts online.  You’d think living in Long Island would be punishment enough, but Fox wants $15 million.  The only new script named in the suit was for Deadpool, the upcoming Ryan Reynolds movie.  Hey, guys?  Just say they’re suing her over Deadpool. Who cares if scripts for old movies are online?  Who reads a script for a movie they can just watch?  What is this, reverse college?

Cliff’s Notes me while I hit this beer bong, Yahoo:

On her personal website, McIlvaine describes herself as a “struggling screenwriter who sells flowers over the phone by day and writes scripts by night.” [I smell Katherine Heigl vehicle! -Ed] She says she collected scripts that were already posted on the web and made a free online library of scripts in order to assist other screenwriters. She’s already soliciting donations for a legal defense fund.

Fox’s lawsuit mentions various scripts including “Aliens,” “Edward Scissorhands,” “Wall Street,” and “Glee.”

Ooh, Glee scripts.  Yes, God forbid the Gleeks have access to spoilers like, “Gwyneth Paltrow ruins popular song.”  (Serious, this clip is worse than cancer).  I guess what the paranoid old farts are worried about is someone reading a script, telling everyone it sucks, and people staying home (even though, in this case, reactions were pretty positive).  But as we’ve learned, the cardinal rule of Hollywood is that No One Ever Reads Anything. Fox is shooting themselves in the foot by not letting the eager do their jobs for them.  After all, what could’ve prevented a line like, “I know it sounds like Star Wars love, but you could do it, you could be Captain America,” better than someone actually reading the script?

If you’re James Cameron, how do you top the highest-grossing movie of all time?  You don’t, you just try to make the same thing over again a couple times.  You’d think a guy who made f-you money last year (not to mention f-me, f-your sister, and f any high-priced call girl or Russian peasant I damn well please money) would be able to do what he wants, and James Cameron can, but for whatever reason, he’s always had a bit of a JRR Tolkien bug up his ass about Avatar.  He doesn’t just want to make the movie, he wants to turn it into a trilogy, write the novelizations, invent the language, and draw up an entirely new font for the subtitles to be 3D-projected in.  That is to say, it seems to be a creative decision and not a business decision.  Either that, or hunting human beings for sport is a lot more expensive than we once thought.  First you have to pay off the families, then there’s bribes to the government, the kind of maids that don’t ask questions, then there’s the yacht and the guns and the guys who make booby traps, not to mention the insurance — it never ends!

James Cameron has locked in a  deal with Fox to make Avatar 2 and 3, due in theaters December 2014 and December 2015 respectively.

Said the director in a statement, “Our goal is to meet and exceed the global audience’s expectations for the richness of AVATAR’s visual world and the power of the storytelling. In the second and third films, which will be self contained stories that also fulfill a greater story arc, we will not back off the throttle of AVATAR’s visual and emotional horsepower, and will continue to explore its themes and characters, which touched the hearts of audiences in all cultures around the world.” [HollywoodReporter]

Whoa, I know she died in the first film, but did anyone else just read that as, “Michelle Rodriguez is back, baby!”?   In any case, shrewd business man that I am, I’ve already begun buying stock in the Papyrus font company.