A guy like Brad Pitt can do anything he likes. He's handsome, he's talented, he's rich, he's funny and outspoken ... and apparently he gets to play sci-fi-action-type video games long before the rest of us. (Bastard!) Variety reports that Mr. Pitt and his Plan B production company have snagged the rights to an upcoming Capcom game called Dark Void. Their report indicates that the game is about "a pilot who crash lands in the Bermuda Triangle following a routine mission and wakes up to find himself in an alternate world."

You can learn more about Dark Void at its Wikipedia page. For example, I just learned that the awesome Bear McCreary is doing the music for the game. (I say keep that guy around for the movie version.) You can also see a bunch of nifty Dark Void artwork over at Capcom's blog. Could this be the beginning of a swanky new action franchise for Brad Pitt? I say the guy has earned one by now.

More information on this project as it becomes available. At this point I just want to check this game out. It looks pretty cool. (Game trailer after the jump!)

Once upon a time, there was a Twilight massively multiplayer online role-playing game being developed called Twilight Online. Think World of Warcraft but for Twihards. They were shut down (one would imagine by Summit, who is making oodles of cash from tie-ins -- have you been to your local Blockbuster and picked up your very own couch pillow with Jacob's face on it?) and the developer is now working on something called "Nebulous Blood." (Read more about Twilight Online over at Geekologie since the details of the game are no longer on its official website.)

The first Twilight video game, one of many that's sure to come, is a trivia game that's part of the "Scene It?" game series. It is currently available as an iPhone app and a DVD game, and now even Wii and Nintendo DS players will be able to give their Twilight skillz a workout as well on November 24th. The console games are from Konami, a pretty damn solid game publisher that's behind great games like the Metal Gear Solid series, Silent Hill, Dance Dance Revolution, and even the recent Saw game.

Twilight game deets are hiding on the other side of the jump.

Despicable Me
Second trailer for this 3D animated comedy, and this time it's focusing on arch villain Gru (voiced by Steve Carell) trying to break into the headquarters of a rival bad guy. This looks like fun and the bit with the shark had me howling. Check it out on July 9.

Sherlock Holmes
A second trailer for the new Holmes fllck with Robert Downey Jr. in the title role aided by Jude Law as Watson. Pretty sure this will have awesome written all over it. Plan a trip to Baker Street for Christmas day.

Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time
There's some serious spectacle at work here. Jake Gyllenhaal stars in this adaptation of a video game I've never played, but I'm pretty sure that's not necessary. It seems tailor-made to be a summer blockbuster, which is good because it comes out on May 28.

Best Worst Movie
Speaking as someone who has watched and enjoyed some truly awful films in his time, this one really speaks to me. This documentary examines the phenomenon/train wreck that is Troll 2, a 1990 horror flick whose badness has become legendary. No release date yet and I suspect this will be hard to find in theaters.

How to Train Your Dragon
In this new animated comedy from Dreamworks, a viking teenager is trying to learn the ways of his people including hunting and killing those pesky dragons that are plaguing them. He soon learns, though, that everything his people know about dragons is wrong and sets out on his own path. Training begins on March 26.

New this week on AOL Moviefone:

• Splinterheads - A young slacker falls in love with a beautiful carnival worker.
  
• Invictus - Morgan Freeman stars as South African President Nelson Mandela who urges the captain of the national rugby team to strive for the World Cup for the sake of unifying their nation in the days following apartheid.
• Eichmann - Historical drama based on the confession of Adolf Eichmann.
• Mammoth - An intricately woven family drama starring Michelle Williams and Gael García Bernal as a married couple whose lives begin to spin out of control.
• Shake Hands With the Devil - Based on true events surrounding a 1994 U.N. peacekeeping mission to Rwanda that failed to prevent the slaughter of 800,000 Rwandans.
• Avatar - Second trailer for James Cameron's epic 3D science fiction extravaganza.
• Did You Hear About the Morgans - A couple on the verge of divorce can't escape each other after they witness a murder and must enter the witness relocation program.

Battleship. Monopoly, Candy Land, and Ouija. A Clue re-do. If it's a board game, chances are it's going to get put into development sometime in the near future. If Hollywood wasn't such a wacky world of insane ideas, I'd be surprised that we hadn't gotten this one earlier. Nikki Finke is reporting that Sony Pictures has bought the rights to Risk, piling more cinematic coin into Hasbro's coffers. The project will be developed by Hasbro in conjunction with James Lassiter and Overbrook Entertainment.

Columbia Pictures pres. Doug Belgrad says audiences have "shown a great desire for films that bring to life everything that has made these franchise properties stand the test of time," and mentioned the likes of Transformers and G.I. Joe. Unsurprisingly then, he says the film will be an exciting movie with "an action-packed, thrilling story." It makes sense -- a game where you roll the dice to world domination is just asking for a big blow-out action flick. That being said...

First of all, there's been no "great desire" to see board game movies get adapted. Nice try. Second, in the piece, Finke talks about Belgrad mentioning the two old cartoon redo's before noting that he did not mention "the dismal movie from the board game Clue." While I understand some people dislike the film, dismal is quite a strong statement -- especially in a world where we're getting Battleship. Finally, with the ever-rising popularity of all things geek, I'm kinda disappointed that this won't be a tongue-in-cheek comedy about a bunch of geeks playing Risk. But who knows? Maybe that will come when someone gets around to buying Magic: The Gathering.

Now how's this for a cool premise? "U.S. states secede from the U.S. and form their own governments that wage a civil war against each other after Washington, D.C., is wiped out in a nuclear blast and chaos ravages the nation." Sounds like it could make for a fairly novel action flick, eh? Well, as Variety informs us, that's the exact plot of a 2005 video game called Shattered Union. (Just because I've never heard of it doesn't mean it's not good. If you've played this one, leave us a mini-review in the comments section.)

The tale of a dystopian American Civil War Part II will come from producer Jerry Bruckheimer (don't act surprised), who in turn will entrust the adaptation to one J. Michael Straczynski. Serious genre fans know this gentleman as the co-creator of Babylon 5. He's written tons of TV, in addition to Eastwood's Changeling, plus he's got a metric ton of massive projects on the way, World War Z and Silver Surfer among them. The studio will be Disney, so don't expect a hardcore carnage-fest. I'm generally a fan of the Bruckheimer / Disney action conflagrations, and this one sure sounds like something I'd dig. Now hire Peter Berg to direct it.

Last summer, the trades reported that Bruce Willis was in talks to play Kane in a big screen adaptation of Kane and Lynch. Perhaps you were one of the game fans excited by that prospect, but as the long months wore on, you may have forgotten such a fleeting news item. But Kane and Lynch didn't go anywhere, and GameDaily is confirming that Bruce Willis is ready to go in with his guns blazing, with Simon Crane directing, and that filming will begin in March 2010. They're just looking for their Lynch and their locations.

GameDaily caught up with producer Adrian Askarieh, who confirmed Willis' casting, and shared just what had lured him to the project in the first place. "[Kyle Ward's] script has been incredibly well-received around town. After Bruce Willis read it, he called it one of the best action scripts he's ever read, and Bruce is an expert in terms of action scripts because he's read everything over the last 20 years." Askarieh describes the film as "a great buddy action movie" (nothing's funnier than kidnapping and death row) and promised that'll remain faithful to the game, at least in terms of its plotline. "It's going to have the basic premise. But the details for the movie are going to be different. It's not going to have every sequence from the game, but it's essentially the story of a mercenary teaming up with a schizophrenic psychopath to save his wife and daughter."

While none of us hold out hope for video game adaptations, I would like this one to turn out solid. It's two death-row inmates (one of whom is heavily medicated) doing rotten, sociopathic things in the name of rescue. It's the kind of movie Hollywood should be able to make, but probably won't, even with an action heavy like Willis.

[via Empire]

The news that Sam Raimi would be helming the game movie of all game movies, Warcraft was met with both squeals of joy, and stunned silence by the movie blogosphere. But now that it's had a little time to sink in, people seem to be really looking forward to it. Some might even wish he'd do a last minute duck out of Spider-Man 4. But at least the wait is broken up by a bit of news, and that's Raimi announcing his screenwriter. MTV and Variety both report that Robert Rodat is set to pen Warcraft for Raimi and Warner Bros.

"We want to be really faithful to the game," Raimi told MTV. "We would have our writer, Robert Rodat, really craft an original story within that world that feels like a World of WarCraft adventure. Only obviously it's very different 'cause it's expanded and translated into the world of a motion picture. [We hope to capture] the Horde and the Alliance and the mythology that takes place in the game, and the archetypes that the game presents. I think we would try and find touchstones within the game to make it accurate and true and choose one or some of the lands that are portrayed in the game with as much accuracy and authenticity as possible."

Rodat might strike some as an odd choice as he's best known for the screenplay to the relentless Saving Private Ryan and the fanciful The Patriot. But both scripts prove he knows his way around a sweeping action scene, and revels in heroes with puffy shirts and villains with cold sneers. So this could turn out quite well indeed.

Will a video game movie based on a game with no characters or storyline whatsoever be more successful than a Max Payne or Tomb Raider? Fox and EA are going to give it a shot and find out, as Variety reports that they are setting up Spore as a feature film. Chris Wedge is attached to direct, with Greg Erb and Jason Oremland writing the screenplay.

Spore is a colorful, family friendly game that allows you to build a variety of fanciful creatures. But perhaps most notably, it allows you to evolve them. Your creatures start out as microscopic organisms, develops into a complex animal, and becomes a social and intelligent creature. You help guide its society from a primitive stage all the way to space travel. It's a very organic game not only in its single-player conception, but because it allows you to share your creatures and your worlds with other gamers, and create a comprehensive universe at the Sporepedia. Fittingly, the Sporepedia acted as kind of historical documented, and recorded everything glorious and dubious about the player created worlds.

So, when a game is all about playing Supreme Being, how do you make a movie out of it? Wedge isn't sure yet, but he feels the property is rich in possibility. "I'm always looking for unique worlds to go to in animation. From every perspective -- visually, thematically and comedically -- the world of Spore provides the potential to put something truly original on the screen." It might just create something quite original off, if they kept a bit of evolution in its storyline. Haven't you always wanted to see a cartoon picketed by Kirk Cameron?

Well, we already knew that Milla Jovovich was going to be back as Alice in the latest installment of Resident Evil, but it turns out she won't be the only comely Zombie-hunter back in the mix. In an interview with Boris Kodjoe (Surrogates), the actor told Blackfilm that he has been hired to star alongside Wentworth Miller and a returning Ali Larter (reprising her role as Claire Redfield) in the latest installment of the zombie-action franchise. Kodje first announced his new job on his twitter account, and so far has been pretty chatty about the production. Not only has he confirmed that Paul W.S. Anderson will be directing (possibly in 3-D), but he also gave us a few juicy plot details.

According to the actor, Afterlife will center on Alice, "...roaming the world looking for survivors and she's wound up in LA, which has been burning for three years. She comes across an LA jail surrounded be these half-dead, uhh... [Zombies] Anyway, she comes across the jail and there's a couple of survivors and she lands on top of the roof and partners up with me to fight the guys that are coming after them. We're trying to get all of the survivors out of the jail to safety." When asked about Miller's role, Kodje told Blackfilm that the Prison Break star will be, "...playing a guy that we actually locked up when we took over the jail because we weren't sure if he was one of them or not. He comes into play as we try to find a way to get out with our survivors" -- and I guess if you need a guy to engineer a jailbreak, Miller is really the only logical choice.

Resident Evil: Afterlife will start shooting in Toronto in the next couple of weeks, and is scheduled to arrive in theaters on September 27, 2010.

Earlier this summer, the brakes were put on Universal's adaptation of Bioshock due to its enormous budget, and a need for tax incentives were said to be pushing the film overseas. The budgetary crisis put Gore Verbinski into a bit of a pickle, and he was unsure he would continue with the film if it moved to London. Now it looks like Verbinski is officially off the project, and Universal has hired Juan Carlos Fresnadillo (28 Weeks Later) to go under the sea instead.

Variety reports that Fresnadillo is still in talks, and that it all becomes official if Bioshock's maker, Take-Two Interactive, agrees to the decision as they must approve the choice of director. But the decision indicates they are shaving that budget, and they are determined to make the film overseas. Universal is also determined that this won't turn into another Halo incident. (Although I think we all agree that any disappointment that caused District 9 was very much worth it, right?)

It has to be a huge disappointment for Verbinski, who dropped Pirates 4 to tackle Bioshock, and really seemed to love the project. (Perhaps Verbinski will find himself in a similar Cinderalla situation as Neill Blomkamp!) Of course, the big question remains as to whether all of this talk is even worth it, since we know what game adaptations are generally like. A lot of hopes are being pinned on Bioshock, and let's hope a few of them are fulfilled.

When it comes to writing up movie news, there are few stories as despiriting as video game options. It goes without saying that there hasn't been one console-to-silver-screen adaptation yet that's been worth its weight in CGI. While we're all hoping that The Prince of Persia breaks the mold, if he doesn't, there's always Just Cause.

Variety reports that Adrian Askarieh, the man behind Hitman and the upcoming Kane and Lynch has nabbed the rights to Eidos' Just Cause franchise. (If franchise is the right word -- the series has only had one outing back in 2006 though Eidos is readying a sequel as we speak.) The original game was centered around a mysterious, handsome fellow named The Scorpion who has the awkward task of overthrowing Caribbean regimes while trying to dodge pirates, mercenaries, and rogue agents. As with all video game heroes, he's a man of high-tech gadgets, and favors a grappling hook for his iconic item of action. Eidos describes him as "a mix of Jason Bourne, James Bond, Wolverine and Rambo, with a touch of Enrique Iglesias." In other words, he's macho, but he's also hot.

Askarieh is looking to develop the project independently, and hasn't submitted it to a studio. Well, we'll certainly wish him the best in bringing The Scorpion to life. Personally, I think he ought to cross him over with Warner Bros' Tomb Raider reboot. She could be hunting for artifacts, he could be overthrowing a regime, and wham! Romance can blossom amid all the semi-automatic gunfire, and money is saved by getting two adaptations for the price of one.

On the occasion of the immiment theatrical release of G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra, it's impossible to ignore the fact that movie studios are continuing to search for beloved toy properties that may be well-suited as blockbuster franchises with worldwide appeal. In recent months, we've been threatened with the prospect of movies based on Monopoly, Candy Land, Ouija, Battleship, Stretch Armstrong, and Major Matt Mason, among others.

Of course, for every Transformers and G.I. Joe movie that makes it to the finish line, there are dozens of concepts that are left behind in the search for the perfect toy -- one that lends itself most readily to situations in which things blow up every ten minutes. Thus, straight from my fevered imagination (and inspired by Scott Weinberg's Cinematical Seven: Bad Ideas for Board Game Movies), here are seven 'toy into movie' concepts that were abandoned or outright rejected as completely unworkable ... for now.

1. Crayola Crayons
After the success of Pee Wee's Big Adventure and Beetlejuice, Tim Burton was all set to direct another children's fantasy, this time an epic tale of the birth, life, and death of a box of Crayola Crayons in their ultimately futile struggle to gain respectability as independent artists. (See unrelated original photograph by David Neff above, which hints at how the death scene might have looked.) Representing a rainbow of colors, the Crayons would also have imparted important anti-racist messages to its young audience. Given the opportunity to make a Batman for a new generation, however, Burton chose the mad world of Bruce Wayne and the Joker over Salmon, and the soothing comforts of crayons. Later, elements of the script were recycled and used in Edward Scissorhands.

There are plenty of fun, or at least serviceable, video games based on movies, and there have been plenty of abominable ones as well. I've paid cash money to see freaky skinless zombie dogs in Resident Evil and Resident Evil: Apocalypse, and Lara Croft swing from the ceiling in at least one of the Tomb Raider movies. I've wisely avoided the Uwe Boll poopfests, especially Postal, an adaptation of a game that was a cheaply made piece of crap when I first played it in, oh, the early '00s. Let's not even discuss the Mortal Kombat movies or the Super Mario Bros. movie that Harold Ramis wisely passed on. There are just so many mediocre games that have gotten way too much screen time.

But perhaps the cinema will begin to shine for us video game/film nerds. (Not too brightly, though -- it's dark in here with all the monitors!) There are plenty of excellent games out there, and even if they don't all quite make it to the big screen, recent developments have got me hopeful that really cool directors are sitting up and taking notice.

The dead have risen from the grave! If you're a Castlevania fan who thought you weren't going to be subjected to a big-screen version of your beloved game, think again. In the midst of the news frenzy coming out of SDCC, Bloody Disgusting got the chance to speak with Saw co-creator James Wan, and he confirmed that he has just signed to direct the video game adaptation for producer Paul W.S. Anderson. Wan tells BD, "I'm very fresh on this project, so its early stages and I'm still trying to work things out, but the producers love my vision for it"

The Castlevania video game franchise mainly centered on a war between the vampire hunting family known as the Belmonts and the big bad blood-sucker himself, Dracula. The game is one of Konami's biggest titles, and was considered one of the best action-platform games around. But as we were soon to find out, it wasn't going to be an easy transition from the console to the big screen.

If you haven't been keeping track, (and who could blame you) here's a brief history on the troubled flick: the announcement of a feature film Castlevania first came about in 2007, but over the next two years little ground had been made. For starters, there were personnel changes and then there was the double-whammy known as rewrites. The last anyone had even heard from the project was that Sylvain White (Stomp The Yard) had reportedly been hired to direct. But then the writer's strike hit and the project ran into a brick wall -- but that was then, and this is now.

After the jump: find out what Wan has planned for the Belmonts...