Olivia Wilde, who we adore on House and look forward to seeing in the sequel to Tron, will join The Ruins’ Jonathan Tucker in the cast of The Next Three Days, a thriller directed by  Paul Haggis for Lionsgate. The cast already includes Russell Crowe and Elizabeth Banks, which is said to be the story of a woman (Banks) imprisoned for a murder she claims she didn’t commit while her husband (Crowe) who tries to vindicate her.

The Wizards of Waverly Place, the popular Disney Channel series, has received an order for an additional eight episodes. Now in its third season, the show was awarded an Emmy this month in the children’s programming category. It also scored huge ratings when a feature-length version aired in August. It’s no surprise that the show has a rabid following with Disney raking in bucks from consumer products ranging from video games to books and even clothing lines.

Pity Skynet. They rule the world of the future but can’t seem to get it right in the present. Rights to the Terminator franchise have been handed from one company to another and now Halcyon Holding Group is undergoing Chapter 11 reorganization which will affect plans for the Terminator.

Nikki Finke at Deadline Hollywood reports that Halcyon has retained FTI Capital Advisors to help them determine the best course of reorganizing. The production entity wound up this way after a dispute erupted between them and Pacificor, a Santa Barbara-based hedge fund.

“Based on our extensive due diligence, we believe the value of the Terminator franchise alone is substantially greater than the $30 million Halcyon paid for it in 2007,” Kevin W. Shultz, Senior Managing Director of FTI Capital Advisors, said in statement. “In our view, Halcyon enjoys a wide variety of strategic options and we intend to explore them all.”

In addition to the still-popular Terminator, Halcyon has first-look rights to the complete works of Philip K. Dick.

Terminator: Salvation suffered from weak reviews and poor box office, hoping to rake in some fresh cash when the DVD is released December 1. Producers from the television version, The Sarah Connor Chronicles, continue to hope to continue the saga in some new manner, possibly as direct-to-video tales. The second season DVD set was released last week.

Primeval, the much loved but low-rated British series has been given a fourth season order after ITV1 cut a deal with the digital channel Watch. According to a report in the Guardian, the series will be co-funded between the two with an order given for 13 new episodes, to be shown in two arcs.

After the third season aired earlier this year, ITV canceled the series, leaving production firm Impossible Pictures, scrambling to salvage the show which has a strong following as witnessed by licensed  books, audio adventures and a possible American feature film to be produced by Warner Bros.

The shows will air in early 2011 with BBC Worldwide handling international distribution. American fans most recently watched the series on BBC America. The current season was released on DVD on September 15.

The Guardian noted, “Watch – which already airs sci fi shows Doctor Who and Torchwood – will repeat it soon after and then premiere the fifth series later the same year, followed by ITV1.”

The full cast is expected to return including Hannah Spearritt, Andrew-Lee Potts and Jason Flemyng. Adrian Hodge remains showrunner.

Archie Comics is perhaps the most innovative publisher
around these days, although for many comics fans they’re beneath the radar.
That’s a shame; folks are missing out on some great stuff.

Some fans are aware of their New Look digest books
(“Ultimate Archie”?), and Mike Uslan’s Marriage of Archie and Veronica has made
headlines. For me, well, I’m looking forward to their upcoming crossover with
the 1950s/60s Archie Comics characters: Cosmo the Merry Martian, Super Duck,
Seymour and friends. But the stunt they’ve just announced is the most
provocative one yet.

Tom Root, co-head writer/ co-producer of Robot Chicken and co-creator/executive
producer of Adult Swim’s new Titan
Maximum parody series, is writing the 200th issue of Jughead. Yeah, that’s volume two of Jughead; you know how comic book numbering goes these days.

Both Robot Chicken
and Titan Maximum are, to put it
politely, hardly family fare… unless your family has the name “Manson” in it.
The Adult Swim broadcasts are heavily bleeped – the DVD releases are not – and
they tend to be quite violent and, dare I say it, irreverent. Oh, and extremely
funny. Which probably tells you more about me than you wanted to know.

The story, “Something Ventured, Something Gained,” starts
out with Jughead trading his, ahh, metabolism to a witch for a
mega-cheeseburger. Bizarre wackiness ensues: Archie tries to cut a deal to
trade the witch his awesome wholesomeness to restore his best friend to
normalcy, Betty and Veronica try to cut a deal to restore Archie’s purity, and
so on. All the while, Jughead actually
gains weight!

It probably would have been easier for the Riverdale crew
to just drop a dime on Sabrina, but hey, count me in! After all the mindless,
in-perpetuity crossover events from DC and Marvel, I can use a self-contained
book-lengther!

Everything is going to hell. Everything is always going to hell, and always has been, of course, but
it’s going to hell even more now than it ever has been, and quicker, too. And
so we get ever more stories about those hells – like these two very different
books that I have to talk about today. They even both have people with gas
masks on the cover!

Toxic Planet

David Ratte

Yen Press, August 2009, $12.99

Sometime in the future, the world is so crowded and polluted
that everyone wears gas masks all of the time, and the natural world is
essentially forgotten. Toxic Planet is a
satire – and a broad, obvious one at that – so there’s no point to asking what
kind of food these people eat; it’s not designed to show how this world
actually works, but to make obvious points about our own world.

Our hero is a factory worker named Sam; his blonde wife and
aged grandmother are never named, but that’s OK; they’re all such broad
characters that real names are superfluous anyway. Other characters include an
unnamed owner of the plant and his young son, the President of the United
Global States, who is an odd combination of Bush and Sarkozy, and the union rep
Tran, who gets to be the voice of reason (reason here being very much a
relative concept). Later on, Sam’s long-lost parents – they’re ecologists,
which is about as popular and mainstream in this society as a combination of
Muslim, Communist, and child molester would be in darkest Alabama – return from
the countryside (yes, the world is completely polluted everywhere, and yet
there’s still an unspoiled “countryside,” but don’t ask), with his younger
sister Orchidea, and they get to be the even more obvious voices of reason.

Toxic Planet is funny
here and there, and dull and axe-grinding equally as often. And it’s really
much, much too long for the message – yes, we all agree that polluting the
entire planet, declaring war on defenseless countries, and similar things are
Really Bad, but we don’t need to keep seeing heavy-handed double-reverse
sermons on the subject over and over for more than a hundred pages. Ratte’s
world isn’t clever or interesting; he just wants to make it dirty and
unpleasant, and he succeeds. The one interesting part of watching the axes
grind are the times when Ratte’s French ideas of what’s obvious and true – so much
so that he doesn’t have to say them, just have his characters parroting whatever
he considers the opposite – aren’t at all clear to a North American audience,
and so the reader can’t quite tell what he’s so worked up about.

Ratte’s art almost makes up for that, even
laboring under the constraints his writing has given it – no faces, only gas
masks, and characters who have to be differentiated mostly by hairstyle and typical
clothing – with an appealing lightness and energy. But Toxic Planet is the kind of book that can make a reader want to
drive a SUV to McDonald’s for lunch and then go prospect for oil in a
wilderness, just out of spite. (more…)