‘Rome’ Leaps from HBO to Silver Screen
"There is talk of doing a movie version," Bruno Heller told The Hollywood Reporter about Rome. "It’s moving along. It’s not there until it is there. I would love to round that show off."
The show, which starred Kevin McKidd and Ray Stevenson, ran for just two seasons on HBO but was deemed too costly a project to continue despite reasonable ratings. The network counted the beans and effectively canceled the series before the second season could even air in spring 2007. To the premium channel’s surprise, the series earned four Emmy Awards for the first season plus seven more awards and remarkably good ratings for the second.
With HBO now admitting their mistake, Heller is at work on a feature when not working on CBS’ The Mentalist, the one sure fire ratings hit among freshman series. As for McKidd’s Lucius, who died at the end of the series, "It was very deliberate that we saw him drifting away but didn’t see him atop a funeral pyre," Heller said.
The original series bible called for the third season to feature the “hedonistic Roman leaders to deal with the rise of a certain problematic rabbi — a story line that would have put a whole new spin on the Greatest Story Ever Told and potentially bring Rome a larger audience.”
"I discovered halfway through writing the second season the show was going to end," Heller said. "The second was going to end with death of Brutus. Third and fourth season would be set in Egypt. Fifth was going to be the rise of the messiah in Palestine. But because we got the heads-up that the second season would be it, I telescoped the third and fourth season into the second one, which accounts for the blazing speed we go through history near the end. There’s certainly more than enough history to go around."
Should the movie get a green light, rounding up the cast may be tough as the lead actors have all found other work. McKidd can be found on Grey’s Anatomy with Stevenson next seen this Friday in The Punisher: War Zone and Polly Walker set for Sci Fi Channel’s Caprica.
The Toy Industry Association nominees for the 2009 Toy of the Year Awards were announced this week. The 9th annual TOTY Awards will be held at Chelsea Piers in NYC, on Sunday, February 15, kicking off Toy Fair Week. 
Lexi Alexander, director of Punisher: War Zone, opening on Friday, told 
As you might have seen, the Rockefeller Center Christmas Tree was lit last night. But you probably didn’t know what was going around in the background… Jon Sable Freelance and Maggie the Cat wandering around.
Apple has announced that Warner Bros.’ The Dark Knight is the most downloaded film of the year from its iTunes store. The movie is not yet available but pre-orders have pushed it to the top of the charts according to 
Kevin McKidd is a hot property right now. The Rome star is of course ticketed for the big screen version of the HBO series should it actually get made. Currently, he’s the latest male hottie on Grey’s Anatomy and remains interested in visiting Asgard in Kenneth Branagh’s Thor film.
As November sweeps end and the holiday lull sets in, the networks have begun modifying their line-ups for the second half of the season.
When Zack Snyder took footage from The Watchmen around the world, he told journalists in every city that the film was clocking in at 2:43 and would like remain in that range. He and his wife Deborah confirmed to 
The nature of super-hero comics (and serial storytelling in TV as well) has become an incestuous thing, one that feeds on its own cast of characters, no matter how wrongheaded it might seem. In any given story arc, the reader (and the viewer) has been trained to expect The Last Person You’d Ever Expect (fill in the name of your favorite Beloved Supporting Character) to be revealed as the villainous mastermind. And/or salacious details about Our Hero. Dark secrets that threaten the very underpinnings of the lead characters’ being. The promise of certain death for players who’ve existed for decades. (No, really. We mean it!)
A Kennedy Miller Mitchell representative has told 
