“We should keep the part with the El Camino for sure.”

I won’t pretend like GI Joe: The Rise of Cobra was the best movie that we’ve ever seen. I won’t even pretend like it was a good movie. But it was what it was – a movie about a cartoon about toys. So when you’re working with that goofy of a concept, you don’t necessarily expect the film’s writers to submit a screenplay for a modern day Citizen Kane, but David Elliot and Paul Lovett still did their jobs, along with co-writer Stuart Beattie, and $300 million later, Rise of Cobra was sort of a success*.

And in this day and age, a “sort of” success is typically good enough for a sequel, so naturally GI Joe: Retaliation was a go. But instead of Marlon Wayans and Dennis Quaid, Retaliation teamed The Rock and Bruce Willis with Channing Tatum (for a few minutes) and instead of Elliot, Lovett and Beattie, writers Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick were recruited. The result is $355 million and counting at the global box office.

Oh, and a huge lawsuit from Elliot and Lovett, who are accusing Paramount, MGM, Hasbro and Lorenzo Di Bonaventura of stealing their ideas.

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After being bumped from its original December 2012 release, the

I haven’t read the book, but from what I understand, it’s an oral history of a zombie apocalypse told after the fact. The movie is set during the zombie outbreak, with Brad Pitt trying to find out what caused the zombies to become zombies, while stuff explodes around him as graphs and helpful expository dudes tell us how many people have died and Brad Pitt runs and runs. It all feels very Nic Cage. Have you noticed that in movies, “racing against the clock” always involves a lot of actual racing? They should just hire the world’s foremost scientist, Usain Bolt.

Meanwhile, Brad Pitt’s daughter in this may win the son-in-Homeland Memorial Award for being a verbose rube. “Daddy, I’m scared!” Wait, you mean you’re scared of the horde of murderous zombies trying to beat down the door as we cower in this tiny panic room? Gee, what a fresh observation, honey! This changes everything! You’re just the one to lead us out of this mess, we’ll start by declaring you the Empress of Obvioustown.

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Hi, I’m the ship’s doctor, this is how we look and dress in the future

The second trailer for Star Trek Into Darkness just hit the web, and as I’ve said all along, letting JJ Abrams direct both Star Trek and Star Wars was a weird idea, like the same guy running both Coke and Pepsi, or having Mick Jagger sing for the Beatles. In this new trailer, it looks like Abrams just gets confused as to which one he’s making and films an homage to that Star Wars scene where the Millennium Falcon has to turn sideways to fit between the asteroids:

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The movie that’s currently being marketed as TOM CRUISE: MIDGET SUPERSPY is actually a pretty clever pulp crime story from the writer of The Usual Suspects with Werner Herzog playing a bad guy. Oh, did you not know that? It’s probably because Paramount thinks you’re eight, and the movie you saw being advertised was TOM CRUISE, 50-YEAR-OLD HARDASS, BEATS PEOPLE UP BECAUSE THE MILITARY! And that’s best-case scenario, assuming you even got past EASY GAY JOKE: THE FILM.

Get it? The title sounds naughty.

“Jack Reacher” is not a title. Jack Reacher is the franchise the studio wants to build, Paramount’s marketing department like a badly written character spouting his motivations out loud instead of dialog. Raiders of the Lost Ark, First Blood, shit, even The Bourne Identity – those were titles, people calling them “Rambo” came later. More than just crappy branding and presumptuous marketing, “Jack Reacher” is symptomatic of a mindset stuck in the days when you could just put a big star like Tom Cruise’s name above the title and every Joe Sixpack and Charla Cheesesnack would rush to the multiplex from all around to throw money at you while it snowed cocaine. Only it’s not 1985 anymore. You actually have to sell what you’ve got. And what you’ve got ain’t James Bond: Musclecar Edition. And thank God. The world needs another invincible secret agent franchise like Tom Cruise needs extra large muscle tees.

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After a trailer for the trailer, a thousand reminders about when the trailer would be (save the date! for our commercial!), and a careful buzz-building period (which in practice just gave us more time to talk trash about how bad and not like the book it looked), the full trailer for World War Z, directed by Marc Forster, loosely based on the Max Brooks novel, is finally here. As someone who, unlike Burnsy, didn’t read the book or have much investment in this project one way or the other, it doesn’t look like the worst thing in the world. They clearly threw out the oral history conceit and just made it a traditional zombie apocalypse movie, so you can understand why someone hoping for “World War Z” would be pissed. But for the rest of us, it just looks like 28 Days Later with that guy from the Chanel commercial running around fighting people with a flowy scarf on. “Plans disappear, dreams take over… But wherever I go… F*CKING ZOMBIES, EVERYWHERE! RUNNNNNNN!”

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