Forgive us if we squeal like little girls, but Warner Bros. has announced that Johnny Depp is set to play Barnabas Collins in a film based on the kitschtastic '60's horror soap "Dark Shadows." We don't want to date ourselves, but as small children (very, very small, like negative-five years old) we obsessively watched DS every afternoon with our babysitter, and cut our literary teeth on novelizations of same. Oh, how we wanted to grow up to be as creepy and as glamorous as Angelique! If only every man had sexy sideburns like Quentin Collins, the angst-ridden werewolf! Every time we see an old movie with Joan Bennett, we think, Ooooh, it's Elizabeth Collins Stoddard, the matriarch of Collinwood! Depp has partnered with producer Graham King (The Departed, Traffic, Gangs of New York) to get the project off the ground, securing the rights from the estate of "Dark Shadows" creator Dan Curtis, who died last year. Even if the project goes smoothly, it'll be awhile before it hits theaters -- Depp just finished shooting the Tim Burton-directed Sweeney Todd and is set to star in a Mira Nair adaptation of the novel "Shataram." (Variety)
We're not the first to share this news, but Cinema Sideshow would like to jump on the bandwagon and applaud the return of Karen Allen as Marion Ravenwood in the upcoming Indiana Jones and the Osteoporosis of Doom. Allen's casting was officially announced at -- where else? -- Comic-Con, where Paramount execs also previewed exciting still photos of Harrison Ford downing cans of vodka-laced Ensure while propmasters prepped Indy's motorized wheelchair for a big chase scene. (Indiana Jones.com)
MySpace and Dark Horse Comics premiered a free, online comic-book series today, kinda-sorta inspired by the publisher's "Dark Horse Presents" anthologies that ran from 1996 through 2000. First up: "Sugarshock," a new comic from Joss Whedon and artist Fabio Moon, "The Comic-Con Murder Case" by the brilliant Rick Geary, "Samurai Heaven and Earth: The Forest" from Luke Ross and Ron Marz, and "The Umbrella Academy" by My Chemical Romance singer Gerard Way and artist Gabriel Ba. All are quite good but, being longtime Whedon fans, our favorite so far is "Sugarshock," which appears to be about a space-traveling, all-girl rock band who travel with a male groupie (called "Groupie") and a robot named Phil. We don't want to spoil anything for you, but any comic with the throwaway line, "Dude, GWAR fell on your car" is something we're gonna read to the end. (Dark Horse Presents)
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