It’s a pretty big decision to choose the host of The Academy Awards every year. There have been some epic hosts in the past, and some pretty bad ones. One thing is for sure, it’s going to be hard to top last year’s picks of Alec Baldwin and Steve Martin. It seems like the Academy has made their choice, however, as word is coming out that James Franco and Anne Hathaway are currently booked for the event. Here’s the official press release.

“James Franco and Anne Hathaway personify the next generation of Hollywood icons— fresh, exciting and multi-talented. We hope to create an Oscar broadcast that will both showcase their incredible talents and entertain the world on February 27,” said Oscar telecast producers Bruce Cohen and Don Mischer. “We are completely thrilled that James and Anne will be joining forces with our brilliant creative team to do just that.”

Franco, who currently can be seen in “127 Hours,” will be making his second appearance on an Oscar telecast. His other film credits include “Eat, Love, Pray,” “Date Night,” “Milk” and “Pineapple Express.” Franco is also known for his portrayals of Harry Osborn in the “Spider-Man” trilogy.

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Back at Comic-Con, Castle creator Andrew Marlowe spilled the beans on a Nick Fury script he had written for Marvel. Last we heard he was still tweaking it and about to hand it over to the studio, and it looks like that’s exactly what he’s done.

We recently got a chance to catch up with Marlowe in between scenes on the set of ABC’s Castle to discuss his plan for the first agent of S.H.I.E.L.D. and he believes a Fury movie based on his script has great potential.

It’s been in Marvel’s hands for a while. They’re point of view is that Nick has never supported his own comic book. It’s only been special runs or one-shots.

I think that they have questions whether the audience will show up for a character if they spent $150-$200 million on a movie. Crashing the helicarrier? Very expensive.

My script was more along the lines in a Steranko mode. Like the American James Bond. I think with Sam Jackson, they’ve gone in a different direction from my script, but I think that if that character continues to excite audiences, I think that there are ways to do it. I haven’t read The Avengers script yet, but I know they guys at Marvel are smart in terms of the intersection of the creativity, the fun, and the commerce of it all.

Right now, it’s in their very capable hands, and I have faith in them.

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Since the announcement that Disney purchased Marvel Entertainment over a year ago, we the fans have been waiting to see exactly how that would effect us, because really, it’s all about us. We haven’t seen any mega-crossovers like Daredevil the Pooh or Spider-Mouse, but it looks like Disney may just be pulling some weight by bringing a few Marvel titles to your TV screen.

After a presentation on the Disney lot, Marvel has put together a short list of properties that they are looking to bring to TV in the next few years. On the very top of that list is a live action Hulk series, helmed by comic veteran Jeph Loeb, who most know for his work on NBC’s Heroes.

Hulk could go into production over at ABC as early as mid-summer. Next in line, the plan is to work on a series based on the Cloak & Dagger franchise, which would go straight to ABC’s cable network, ABC Family. The story would follow the duo of Tyrone Johnson (aka Cloak, who has the ability to teleport) and Tandy Bowen (aka Dagger, who has the ability to heal and create daggers from light).

Both shows are in very early development, but that hasn’t stopped the studio from poking around a handful of other properties to adapt into the small screen. Heat Vision has the short list.

Executives presented ABC suits with a list of titles they identified as possible series:
• Heroes for Hire (focusing on ex-con Luke Cage offering to take on bad guys for a price);
• The Eternals (a race of superpowered beings live amid humanity in secret, inspiring legends);
• Agents of Atlas, Alter Ego (private investigator Jessica Jones takes on cases involving superhumans);
• Moon Knight, the Red Hood (a low-rent criminal discovers a cloak that gives him superpowers);
• Ka-Zar (a Tarzan-type and his saber-toothed tiger must journey to the concrete jungle to seek justice);
• Daughters of the Dragon (a dynamic female duo, one with a bionic arm and the other a granddaughter of a samurai, open a private-detective agency); and
• The Punisher (one man wages a war on crime; already adapted as two feature films).

Even given Hulk and Cloak & Dagger, this is an incredible list, and could only mean that Warner/DC and Disney/Marvel have decided that the silver screen wasn’t large enough for them to wage war, and they’re now taking over our living rooms. In any outcome, we all win.

Are you a fan of compelling British TV programs about spies and the world they live and work in? Ever seen a show called Spooks (aka MI-5)? If so, this post is for you.

According to Deadline, the BBC series Spooks is headed to television here in the States and will land at ABC. The network has reportedly closed a deal for the show and will enlist writer Michael Seitzman (Empire State, North Country) to pen the script.

The show, created by David Wolstencroft, is extremely popular in the UK and follows a team of MI-5 officers who work out of offices known as The Grid. From there, they carry out missions aimed at stopping evil in its many forms plus they deal with internal and personality conflicts among the team and their families. The show originally launched in the UK in 2002, with a new season scheduled to premiere this fall.

We previously reviewed season one of MI-5 here at The Flickcast and back then it got a positive review. Once the series reaches American shores in a new, Americanized version, we’ll have to revisit it and see how it compares to the original. Let’s hope favorably.

Julie Benz appears to have gone from victim to hero in one fell swoop. After leaving behind Rita Morgan after four seasons on Dexter, the actress is primed to portray Stephanie Powell on ABC’s upcoming family show, No Ordinary Family.  No longer the dead body in the bathtub, Powell is a busy professional scientist and researcher who develops super speed following a crash landing in the Amazon on a trip with her family. After deciding to move on from Dexter, Renz related that she was looking for a new challenge and the character of Stephanie was just what she was looking for.

“When pilot season started, my quest was to find a character that was strong female character, a character that is more active than Rita. I was getting offered a lot of parts that were similar to her and I was turning them down because I wanted to find something that was different.”

While there might be the temptation to compare Rita with Stephanie, Benz insists that she didn’t pull inspiration from portraying a mother on a previous show. For one thing, the personalities are incredibly different.

“I think they’re both mothers, but other than that, there’s really no commonality. Rita was not career driven at all, she was very dependent, very damaged with a lot of  vulnerabilities, very emotional. Stephanie’s very controlled, a Type A personality, goal oriented and has a hard time interacting with her own family.”

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In his first TV show since retiring the role of Vic Mackey in The Shield, Michael Chiklis will soon be bounding into your living room as Jim Powell, a police sketch artist who receives the supernatural powers of super-strength, the ability to be bullet-proof and can leap buildings in a…well, you get the idea.

We caught up with Chiklis at San Diego’s Comic-Con and talked to him about his upcoming role and how it is and isn’t a departure from characters he’s portrayed in the past. After all, how do you follow up Vic Mackey by playing another cop?

“Here we have a family show at its core, wrapped in a police procedural, wrapped in a superhero show. That’s something I’ve not seen before. If The Shield lacked any credibility at all, it was the fact that Mackey didn’t have an aneurysm. Seven years of that can wreck havoc on your nervous system and it’s really kind of great and refreshing to do something that I can sit with my family and watch. My eleven year old was starting to question whether I was even an actor. She’s like, ‘dad, do you really act? I can’t see anything you’re in.’”

The concept behind No Ordinary Family will sound familiar to Fantastic Four and The Incredibles fans, but there hasn’t been an adaptation in this vein developed for television in recent memory. Sure, four characters get powers (strength, super speed, telepathy and super intelligence) and yes, it’s combined within a family that is struggling to stay connected and important to each other. But what would you rather see? Superheroes or more Cops?

“I thought it was long overdue. I did the Fantastic Four movies and I’ve been a comic book geek for a long time, since I was a kid. It’s funny though, a bunch of people have said to me, almost as if there’s been tons and tons of superhero shows on television, and to mind, I only can think of one, really in the last 20 years, which is Heroes, which is a decidedly different show.

But I’m thinking, we’re on cop show 475,000 and no one goes, ‘oh really, another cop show?!’ And some people are all, oh you’re going to play another superhero again? Yes! This place (Comic-Con) isn’t getting smaller. Now they’re making more money at Comic-Con than they did at the SuperBowl. This is a genre that’s here to stay. And it’s only natural as a genre to explore the different shapes of it.”

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ABC may have given the axe to a few big shows this past season, and lost (no pun intended) one of their biggest draws, but it seems that a sparkle can still be seen on the network, in the form of the police cadet drama Rookie Blue. ABC recently renewed the series for a second season, after it scored the network’s highest-scripted debut ratings in six years only three episodes in.

From Variety:

It now ranks second in its Thursday timeslot behind “So You Think You Can Dance,” among adults 18-49 and 18-34.”We’re very pleased that the show has connected with viewers, especially considering the challenge of finding an audience in the summer,” said Quinn Taylor, ABC Entertainment Group’s senior VP of movies, minis and acquisitions.

While the premise is the same, the show is somewhat different than the first of the Police Academy films, sans Guttenberg. Peregrym leads the charge alongside Gregory Smith, Charlotte Sullivan, Enuka Okuma and Travis Milne as rookie cops who work through their freshman year as cops. One could consider this show to be the police version of the networks already-popular Grey’s Anatomy.

The show also marks the star Missy Peregrym’s first show since Reaper to get a second season, but we all know how that ended before. Let’s hope history doesn’t repeat itself.

The fourth episode in the season, entitled “Signals Crossed”, involves Andy (Peregrym) going undercover as a prostitute to impress the Sergeant and airs tomorrow night at 9/8C on ABC.

There are certainly a lot of new shows hitting both network and basic cable TV this Summer and Fall. Some that we’re pretty excited for, and some we can’t wait to miss (looking at you, The Cape). One of the shows that looks to have some promise is ABC’s upcoming half-hour comedy Mr. Sunshine.

The show stars Matthew Perry as Ben Donovan, a sports arena manager who goes through a mid-life crisis right after his 40th birthday, all while dealing with the oddball employees and demands that his job presents.

Helping out Perry is a pretty solid cast of TV regulars like West Wing favorite Allison Janney, Las Vegas’s Nate Torrence and James Lesure, Better Off Ted’s Andrea Anders, and even Portia Doubleday for good measure.

While the cast alone should be enough to get us excited, we’re more psyched by the fact that the show is being written by TV veteran Thomas Schlamme and Perry himself. Fans of Studio 60 On the Sunset Strip know that this team is quite impressive when at their peak, so we can’t wait to see more.

Check out two new clips and a sneak preview of the show after the jump, and stay with ABC this October, as Mr. Sunshine makes it’s debut.

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I guess one show about spies isn’t enough for J.J. Abrams. With Undercovers currently going ahead at NBC, the writer-director-producer is now discussing the possibility of bringing back his earlier spy series Alias to ABC.

According to “insider” sources, the rebooted series would have some elements of the original that featured a then-unknown Jennifer Garner. However, it would be a more straightforward action/spy show and wouldn’t contain the mythology involving the Rimbaldi prophecy and subsequent other developments.

While discussion are only in the very preliminary stages, ABC would reportedly make this move in an effort to hold onto the audience they will be losing now that Lost has ended and FlashForward was cancelled. Plus, spies seem like a hot commodity on TV right now with the return next season of Chuck, USA’s Burn Notice still going strong and the upcoming debuts of the CW’s Nikita and the aforementioned Undercovers.

Given all that, it would seem the decision by ABC to reboot the show might be a good one. Still, you have to wonder about TV executives. They lose a show like Lost and the best idea they can come up with to “replace” it as to reboot a series that only lasted five years and towards the end got incredibly convoluted and lost a great deal of its audience?

Well, if a new Alias really does come to pass then my vote for the new Sydney Bristow is Kerri Russell. She was great as a spy (briefly) in Mission Impossible III so I think she would make a great choice. What do you guys think?

Now that this season of primetime TV is coming to a close, we have a few bright spots on the horizon. We’ve been bringing you some of the newest Fall schedules, along with a few previews of upcoming shows we think look cool. Keeping up with that theme we bring you a sneak peak at ABC’s new superhero comedy No Ordinary Family.

From a distance, the story plays out like a live-action version of The Incredibles, but upon closer inspection it actually has a bit more depth. Michael Chiklis plays Jim Powell, a regular husband and father who, alongside his wife and two children, are in an accident that give each of them unique powers. His wife, Stephanie (played by Dexter’s Julie Benz) develops super speed, while his children develop telepathy and other extraordinary mind powers. Jim, however, leads the family with the gift of invulnerability and super strength.

There are some obvious and great connections to former Chiklis projects in the pilot, such as his work as Ben Grimm/The Thing in Fantastic Four, and the fact that he plays a cop again, much like The Shield or The Commish.

The pilot has the potential to be exactly what NBC’s Heroes wasn’t for a lot of fans, and could be a fun, quirky family comedy with a comic book backdrop. Check out the trailer after the jump and be sure to keep an eye (and a DVR) out for No Ordinary Family this Fall on ABC.

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For those of you who watched last night’s 2 and a half hour Lost finale, you know that these things happened (spoiler free): We get some kind of finality for some of the characters, but we still have plenty of unanswered questions about the mysteries of the island.

It turns out that even though writer/creators Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse still got 2.5 hours (not to mention two hours of recap and a special farewell episode of Jimmy Kimmel Live), they still had more story to tell. In fact, they have roughly 20 minutes more. And no, as funny as they are, those Jimmy Kimmel alternate endings don’t count.

In an attempt to keep you invested even longer, Lindelof and Cuse are giving you the answers you’ve waited 6 years for. To get them, you only have to wait 3 more months.

Said to be attached to the upcoming DVD and Blu-Ray release of the complete series is an additional 20 or so minutes of content that didn’t make it into the series finale. This will allegedly give us answers to questions about the light in the tunnel, as well as finally give us the name of the Man in Black.

Be sure to keep your eyes out for marketing, as Lost: The Complete Collection comes out on DVD and Blu-Ray on August 25th.

Even with a couple of big screen adaptations already out there it looks like the venerable Charlie’s Angels franchise is going to be rebooted yet again. Only this time, it will be back on the small screen where it all started and ABC has chosen the writing team to make it happen.

Former Smallville executive producers Alfred Gough and Miles Millar are taking over writing duties on Angels, which ABC is developing for a potential pilot order and midseason launch. The dynamic duo will replace Josh Friedman, who initially was hired to adapt the project but obviously isn’t working out.

Gough and Millar created and launched Smallville and then ran it for seven seasons before leaving the show in 2008. Even with the addition of these two, the rest of the Angels creative team remains the same, which includes the movie’s producers Drew Barrymore, Leonard Goldberg and Nancy Juvonen.

Not that we necessarily need another Charlie’s Angels (nor do we probably need a reboot of Hawaii Five-O or Rockford Files but it seems we may get one of those too), but it might be fun. Plus, these two guys are pretty talented and have shown they can develop a show, get it launched and carry it a long way. Let’s hope they can inject some of the same into their new project.