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As was expected, after the announcement of Tron Legacy‘s release date on December 17, 2010, The Smurfs movie is the first to say adios to their scheduled release.

Sony has announced that they are moving the new Smurfs movie to Summer 2011, tentatively July 29, 2011. This was an expected move on their part, since they would’ve had stiff competition at the original date with Tron Legacy, Green Hornet and a Yogi Bear movie all in  the works for that same day.

Walt Disney Pictures has set the date for Tron Legacy to debut in screens in the U.S.

December 17, 2010 is officially the day we’ll get to see Tron Legacy. As of now, it pits it against several high-profile movies, which include The Green Hornet, The Smurfs and Yogi Bear.

Probably sometime soon there will be an announcement from at least one of those three films saying they’ll move their release date, since Tron Legacy could very well hit the same target audience for all of them, especially Green Hornet.

UPDATE: The Smurfs has moved to Summer 2011.

UPDATE 2: Disney will also release Tron Legacy in IMAX theaters on the same day.

Sony Animation has released the teaser poster for their upcoming 2010 Smurfs movie. The image was scanned from a magazine print ad that appeared in Europe. It appears to be legit.

Image found on comingsoon.net, where you can see a larger version of the scan.

UPDATE: EW.com has a statement from Columbia Pictures saying the image is “not the beginning of our campaign nor was it done by the studio’s creative ad team.” So it appears the poster is either a fake or just a proof from the ad agency and not the final concept. It was weird they were starting the marketing campaign amost 18 months in advance.

In light of the changes made by the Academy this year over the eligibility and number of nominees in the “Best Picture” category at the Oscars, they have announced how the new rules will be in effect for the upcoming Academy Awards in 2010.

As previously reported, this year 10 films will be nominated in the “Best Picture” category. Before, the winner was decided based on votes from the Academy members on what their selection for the Best Picture of the year was and those votes were counted. Now, with 10 possible nominees, the winner by that method could win with a paltry 11% of the vote! So now, the Academy has said they will not only ask their members which one of the 10 nominees is their favorite, they’ll have to rank them in order from 1st to 10th place.

The vote count will go like this: all members will submit their list ranked from 1 through 10 based on the 10 nominated films only once. The first round of counting will take into account the ones selected as their #1 film, at the end of the count if no film has a 50% majority, the film with the lowest score will be eliminated, all the members ballots who put that last-place film as their #1 will be re-counted with their #2 film being the highest, and again the film with the lowest score will be eliminated, all the ones that had that film as their #2 will then be counted again taking their 3rd choice as the best, and so on, until one film has an absolute majority. Kind of twisted, but way more effective than a film with only 11% of the vote winning as the Best Picture of the year.

In a surprise move, Walt Disney Co. has bought Marvel Enterprises. With this news coming out today, you can expect Marvel comics characters to start appearing all over Disney media soon.

This at first looks like a very smart, though weird, move for Disney. Since they have a huge market for girls already in place with franchises like the Princesses and for tweens with Hannah Montana, the Jonas Brothers and the like, but essentially no market geared towards boys. Now with all the comic heroes they can get with the Marvel merger, they can attract little boys and teenagers to the new Disney world, which will include the addition of the characters to the various Disney theme parks around the world, their television channels like ABC, ABC Family, Disney Channel, Disney XD, and many more.

The deals Marvel had with other studios for their movie franchises will keep intact, at least until those contracts end. So the X-Men will still be released under 2oth Century Fox, Iron Man through Paramount, and Spider Man by Sony Pictures. So Disney will be in a partnership with 3 big rivals very soon.

So now you’ll probably see Cinderella hooking up with Iron Man on your next visit to Disneyland!

Christopher Nolan’s new film, Inception, stars loads of people, but one thing’s for sure, the movie itself is what will drive viewers to see this thing, not the cast. Damn was that a big tease of a possibly great sci-fi/action/thriller or what!

Here’s the just released trailer that played in front of Iglourious Basterds, via Yahoo! Movies:

The film was written by Nolan himself, it stars Leonardo DiCaprio, Marion Cotillard, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Ellen Page, Cillian Murphy and Michael Caine in a small role. Can’t wait for Summer 2010.

Christopher McQuarrie, Academy Award winning writer of The Usual Suspects, is going to write the second installment of the new Wolverine saga.

McQuarrie wrote one of the first drafts of the first X-Men film, teaming up with Bryan Singer again after ‘Suspects‘, but was not officially credited because his wasn’t the final script filmed. He is currently finishing off the first season of his upcoming NBC series, Persons Unknown, which doesn’t yet have a premiere date.

This new Wolverine story will focus on an early 1980′s mini-series by Chris Claremont and Frank Miller, in which he in japan struggling with his animal instinct and the samurai code. Sounds even worse than the previous film, but who knows, McQuarrie is known as a good screen writer.

Universal has confirmed the rumors that have been flying around the internet for the last few days about Bryan Singer being attached to produce and direct a feature film version of Battlestar Galactica.

It is poised to be a completely different take on the story from the current series that just ended its run on the former Sci-Fi Channel, taking it’s cue from a mix of the original series, along with certain stories of that “universe” that have floated around since the mid-70′s.

And as the title of my post goes… say it ain’t so! This is Universal being greedy with a franchise that just finished a very successful run, and will completely alienate the fans of the superb sci-fi drama series. Bryan Singer is on the road to kill yet another beloved story, he should just go back and try to fix Superman and regain his credibility!

Glen Larson, creator of the original series is also producing.

Ok, so this has been out for several days now, but I rewatched it and thought, this has to be posted! So after careful viewing, I don’t get how or why the Cannes people didn’t like it so much, this looks visually amazing! And the casting was incredible, I have to say, after the untimely death of Heath Ledger, turning the story around by having 3 other actors step in to fill the role was brilliant, and they did a remarkable job in making them look the same. I would have to see the full story to see how it all works out, but in this short-form trailer, it looks like they pulled it off! Can’t wait to get to see the full Imaginarium.

The trailer… after the jump…

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Shock til you drop has the first look at the poster and teaser trailer for Prince Caspian, um, Ben Barnes’s new role as the forever-young Dorian Gray, based on the famed novel by Oscar Wilde about a man who’s self portrait ages as time goes by, while he stays young and strong.

The film comes out on September 9 and stars Barnes along with Colin Firth.

Check out the trailer, after the jump….(UPDATE: also after the jump, the new international poster)

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