– Mattel and Warner Bros. — apparently taking pity on the moviegoing audience — have reached a mutual decision to let the rights lapse to “Masters of the Universe,” which Joel Silver had been developing for the studio with “Kung-Fu Panda” director John Stevenson attached to direct. Variety claims that Warners and the toy company “didn’t see eye to eye over the direction of the project,” and that Mattel hope to set the He-Man property up elsewhere, with Stevenson still on board, so we’re not totally out of the woods yet, but at least it should be a few more years of development before this sure-to-be disaster hits the screen.
– Universal and Relativity Media have reached an agreement to release “Sanctum,” the 3-D diving thriller that James Cameron is producing and Alister Grierson (Australian war movie “Kokoda”) is directing. The picture, which sounds a bit like a damper version of “The Descent,” will film later in the year in Australia, and be released at the end of 2010.
– Mandy Moore and Zachary Levi (TV’s “Chuck”) will lend their voices to Disney’s 3-D animation “Rapunzel.” Moore will play the titular long-haired princess, who escapes from her tower and goes on the run with a bandit (Levi). Ordinarily, we’d run for the hills from this, but “Bolt,” the first post-Lasseter Disney animation, was pretty good, and Byron Howard, who was the co-director of that, returns here. The film also marks the return to Disney Animation of Alan Menken, composer of “Aladdin” and “Beauty and the Beast” (who did admittedly write the songs for “Enchanted”).
– Finally, Collider have picked up the final trailer for the excellent-looking, and excellently reviewed, horror film “Trick ‘r Treat.” Like everyone else, we’re baffled this is going straight to DVD (it hits October 6th) — surely Warners could market the shit out it of on the back of Anna Paquin’s “True Blood” success, and history has shown that the teens of America will see pretty much any horror movie that’s put in front of them…
