Movie News & Gossip

Since June, when the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences opened up the best picture race to 10 nominees, Oscar has been waiting for a knight in shining boxoffice armor -- preferably a "Dark Knight": a boxoffice powerhouse with strong critical credentials.

A large part of the rationale for opting for an Oscar Top 10 was the hope that Academy voters would embrace mainstream hits, thereby expanding the potential audience for the broadcast while avoiding the cries of protest from jilted fanboys who felt robbed when "The Dark Knight" failed to earn a best picture nomination last time around.

Dan O'Bannon, the unassuming sci-fi screenwriter and quirky horror specialist behind the "Alien" film franchise, died Thursday in Los Angeles after a short illness. He was 63.

O'Bannon adapted the Philip K. Dick tales "We Can Remember It for You Wholesale" and "Second Variety" into "Total Recall" (1990) and "Screamers" (1995), respectively. He wrote 1985 space vampire tale "Lifeforce," wrote and directed the zombie parody "The Return of the Living Dead" (1985) and helmed "The Resurrected" (1992), an HP Lovecraft adaptation.

LOS ANGELES - The future keeps calling for Zoe Saldana and Sam Worthington.

They had breakout hits last summer in established science-fiction franchises, she in "Star Trek," set in the bright human future of the 23rd century, he in "Terminator Salvation," set in an apocalyptic wasteland a couple of decades from now.

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - The Hollywood studio behind widely-anticipated "Avatar" is banking on the film to drive its biggest U.S. product licensing push in years, starting with toy figures and expanding to items from home decor to party goods.

The News Corp-owned Twentieth Century Fox is making that gamble even though consumers know virtually nothing about the blue, cat-like characters in "Avatar" who will be at the heart of the merchandising effort.

LOS ANGELES - With more fads than folks at an "American Idol" audition, the past decade has been a difficult time to culturally define. One day, everyone was updating their MySpace profiles while sporting Ugg boots and sipping cosmopolitans. The next, they were creating Facebook pages while donning Ed Hardy T-shirts and downing energy drinks.

Superheroes, disaster movies, reality TV, professional wrestling and a boy wizard named Harry Potter weathered the decade's ever-changing pop culture storm while others rode the aughts like a roller coaster. Britney Spears was in, then out, then in again, advantageously morphing herself from teen queen to train wreck to pop diva within the 10-year span.

LOS ANGELES - A colossal budget, visionary technology and a down-to-the-wire workload on a film whose fortunes are a real question mark.

James Cameron has been here before on little ditties called "Terminator 2: Judgment Day" and "Titanic." In case anyone's forgotten how that worked out for him, "Titanic" stacked up 11 Academy Awards, best picture and director among them, and a record $1.8 billion worldwide at the box office.

LOS ANGELES - Hollywood picked the right decade to go over the rainbow.

In an era that brought harsh reality home with the war on terror and an economy gone bust, Hollywood became more of a dream factory than ever, embracing fantastic escapism at a time when audiences needed it most.

Looks like "Land of the Lost" has earned star Will Ferrell the dubious distinction of being the most overpaid actor in show business, according to the list makers at Forbes magazine.

Forbes looked at 100 top actors based on their widely released films over the past five years. It factored in the production costs of those movies against how much boxoffice, DVD and other revenue they generated in order to come with an operating income for each film, which it then compared with the salaries the stars earned.