For those who have been waiting for their first glimpse of the brand new Muppet Movie trailer, it’s here!….sort of. Disney is getting a bit tricky with their first trailer for the film by disguising it as a campy romantic comedy starring Jason Segel and Amy Adams called Green With Envy.

It’s actually quite brilliant of Disney, if they can pull something like this off (which they will). We can only imagine why they’d want to uncover the film this way, except for the possibility that the film’s name is still in debate. The original title was proposed as The Greatest Muppet Movie Ever Made, which has later been rejected by the studio. We just hope Green with Envy isn’t the film’s final title. Here’s the “synopsis.”

Love struck meets star struck when a small town couple (Amy Adams, Jason Segel) head to Hollywood and discover their dreams of hitting the big time may cost them the one thing that matters most – each other.

Those who feel like Segel won’t be able to capture the original spirit of The Muppets, know that this trailer has it all from self-referential humor, to full choreographed musicals, to Sweetums!

We don’t want to ruin any more for you, so be sure to check out the trailer after the jump, and catch “Green with Envy” in theaters on November 23rd.

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There’s no denying that zombies are hot right now. Of course, with that kind of burning press, you’d expect to see the undead walk in just about every form of mass media. But would you expect to see an entire film about zombies as a 3D animated film?

That’s what Focus Features and Laika is hoping for, as the team that brought us Coraline is getting back together for their newest film, ParaNorman. Here’s the breakdown from a Focus press release.

Currently in production, ParaNorman is being directed by Sam Fell and Chris Butler, from Mr. Butler’s original screenplay. Mr. Fell was director of The Tale of Despereaux and Flushed Away. Mr. Butler was storyboard supervisor on Coraline and storyboard artist on Tim Burton’s Corpse Bride. The voice cast includes Academy Award nominee Casey Affleck (The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford), Tempestt Bledsoe (The Cosby Show), Jeff Garlin (Toy Story 3), John Goodman (Monsters, Inc.), Bernard Hill (Titanic), Academy Award nominee Anna Kendrick (Up in the Air), Leslie Mann (Rio), Christopher Mintz-Plasse (How to Train Your Dragon), Kodi Smit-McPhee (Let Me In), and Tony and Emmy Award winner Elaine Stritch (30 Rock).

If that star-studded voice cast isn’t enough to whet your appetite, what if we told you it was about a young boy who could speak with the dead? Here’s the synopsis.

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At the end of the day, it was a Wimpy Kid who beat up on the highly stylized and sexualized Sucker Punch. An effective trailer campaign launched by Warner Brothers stirred up plenty of interest in Zack Snyder’s latest offering, but a 17% drop from Friday to Saturday squelched its chances of winning the weekend.  Snyder previously directed Watchmen and 300, both of which performed much better on their opening weekend than Sucker Punch, which came in at number two with $19M.

Sucker Punch was leading the weekend on Friday, but the drop-off cleared the way for Disney’s Diary of a Wimpy Kid: Rodrick Rules to win the weekend. The sequel to Diary of a Wimpy Kid outperformed its predecessor: Rodrick Rules made $24.4M, while the original Wimpy Kid made about $22M on its opening weekend. With a reported budget of about $18M, Rodrick Rules should put the franchise in good shape for a third movie.

Bradley Cooper’s Limitless didn’t have any trouble retaining an audience. The film only dropped about 19% (very solid for a second weekend) and made an additional $15.2M. That puts its two week tally at $41M. Matthew McConaughey fared almost as well.

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Who wouldn’t want to see a movie starring the dream cast of James McAvoy, Emily Blunt, Michael Caine and Maggie Smith, with cameos by Ozzy Osbourne, Dolly Parton, Patrick Stewart and Hulk Hogan? They had me at James McAvoy.

Throw in some Shakespeare source material and music by Elton John, and one would think we were set. But Gnomeo and Juliet does the seeming impossible—takes all of these phenomenal elements and churns out a movie that’s only sporadically entertaining and completely forgettable. Unlike its durable garden decoration characters, this movie will wash out of your brain with the first drizzle.

Gnomeo and Juliet’s first and biggest problem is its lack of original, engaging characters. Gnomeo, Gnomeo, wherefore art thou, Gnomeo? Who knows, but he’s just your standard love-stricken youth determined to prove himself to the world and win his girl, while Juliet is your standard spunky heroine who’s trapped in a narrow female role but has the ninja skills to fight out.

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We all love LEGO. Everybody grew up with them, so they all hold a special place in our collective hearts. Except for those who grew up with Mega Bloks, but nobody liked those kids growing up anyway.

The world of LEGO has been celebrated more lately as franchises like LEGO Batman and LEGO Star Wars have taken over our consoles. Now we get even more of this fully manifested world as one cinema fan has captured some of our favorite Oscar nominated films and turned them into LEGO.

The remade scenes come from LEGO artist Alex Eylar, who has tons of creations over at MOCPaged. This site is completely dedicated to people making stuff out of their favorite LEGOs so it’s particularly awesome.

While you try to ponder that business model, take a look at some of our favorite Oscar nominated scenes after the jump and comment with guesses on which films these scenes are inspired from. Good luck!

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Take a bunch of women in their late forties to mid-fifties and show them graphic images of violence and mutilation from the upcoming Dead Space 2 (which comes out tomorrow, January 25th) and record their reactions ranging from utter terror to complete revulsion. Then make sure to tell people just how violent your game is over some not so violent in game videos. Slap a “M for Mature” tag on it and there you have your ad campaign with the tag line, “Your Mom Hates This.”

Give me a break. There are so many problems with this campaign that is insulting to the gaming community as well as general consumers. Let’s break this down in a logical manner, even though obviously the advertising agency didn’t.

Dead Space 2 is a rated M game, meaning it should only be targeting players over the age of 18. But, the message of “Your mom hates this” is something that marketers would gear towards a younger self righteous and rebellious person in their early teens. By the age of 18, most people have evolved in to at least somewhat freethinking individuals who make decisions based more on personal preference than just trying to do something to tick their mom off.

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While the Pixar/Disney partnership has been one for the record books, one film that touches the hearts of anyone who has ever picked up a comic book is 2004′s The Incredibles. The film withstands it’s 7 years of release, and will now be getting a brand new breath of life as it makes it’s way to Blu-Ray this April.

The release is said to be a combo pack, which means you’ll not only get the Blu-Ray disc, but a standard definition disc as well as a digital download. The Blu-Ray disc will also be state-of-the art in high definition, bringing you 6x the resolution of a regular DVD.

In promoting this release, Pixar and Disney Home Video released a new trailer, featuring the voice of director Brad Bird reprising his role as the lovable fashionista Edna E. Mode. Check out the trailer after the jump, and get ready for the Blu-Ray combo release on April 11th.

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Everyone’s favorite pink puffball, Kirby, has made his debut to the Wii in the form of Kirby’s Epic Yarn, a colorful, adorable platformer that has rolled itself around my heart and refused to untangle. Throughout the entirety of playing this game, I have never ceased to stop laughing, smiling, and feeling like a 4 year old girl, as I romp, roll, and raced through the levels, making it one of my favorite games of 2010.

The most striking part of this game is the graphics. While the Wii’s graphics cannot begin to compete with the Xbox 360 or the Playstation 3, Kirby’s Epic Yarn takes the limitations of the Wii system and uses that to its advantage. The result is a gorgeous game world, which is all animated to look like fabric, as Kirby’s body gets transformed into yarn at the beginning of the game.

While the gimmic of former Kirbys was the ability to swallow your enemies and turn into various different versions of Kirby, Kirby’s Epic Yarn is quite different. In this game, Kirby has been turned into yarn and must travel through the fabric worlds and collect all the magic yarn, and players must use Kirby’s new state in a different way.

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Who doesn’t love a classic stop-motion Christmas special around the time of the holidays? Rankin/Bass productions like Rudolph The Red-Nosed Reindeer have pulled families together for generations around this time of year, and now it’s time for NBC’s breakout comedy Community to do the same.

Next Thursday, the gang is going a little bit clay, as they get transformed into a world of claymation, thanks to the Dino Stamatolpoulus’ (Star-Burns) stop-motion studio. Here’s the episode’s official synopsis.

When Abed wakes up in stop-motion animation, he takes it as a sign that he and the group must re-discover the meaning of Christmas. Meanwhile, Jeff and Britta become growingly concerned about Abed’s mental health and enlist the help of Professor Duncan. The group undergoes hypnosis to explore Abed’s winter wonderland and soon unravel the truth behind Abed’s madness.

Series stars Danny Pudi and Allison Brie got to go behind the magic at the stop-motion studio and check out how things were going. Check out parts one and two of their all-access tour and be sure to catch “Abed’s Uncontrollable Christmas” Thursday, December 9th, on NBC.

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There have been worse movies than The Nutcracker in 3D. Certainly films made with less ambition, with less skilled actors and more modest sets and effects budgets. But it’s genuinely challenging to recall a more wrong-headed film than Andrei Konchalovsky’s convoluted, frankly baffling re-imagining of a beloved children’s story and ballet.

For all its popularity and name-recognition, Tchaikovsky’s ballet The Nutcracker is a bit light on plot. All the incident is front-loaded to the first half. A girl receives a nutcracker as a Christmas gift. She brings him to life, so he can do battle with the Rat King that enslaved him, and then they return to his fantasy kingdom. The entire second half is just fairies celebrating the Nutcracker’s return. Pretty anti-climactic.

Obviously, anyone wanting to turn the story into a traditional children’s film would have to rework it. But Konchalovsky’s decision to turn the story into a WWII analogy, and to fill the second half with sci-fi/fantasy chase sequences was clearly not the best strategy. (Also, his decision to rework Tchaikovsky’s iconic Nutcracker themes into cheesy musical numbers…more on that later…)

The basic story of The Nutcracker has thus been twisted into this inane sub-Bruckheimer pumped-up fantasy epic about an evil fascist Rat City and the prince, who has been magically transformed into a Nutcracker, that must retake human form and a human rebellion against the rats.

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Slowly but surely, Jim Henson’s legacy is growing bigger and bigger in the public eye, all thanks to the power of viral videos. The Muppets have pulled in millions of views and awards with their antics and music videos, while Sesame Street is still going strong on PBS with some impressive guest stars like Ryan Reynolds and Terrence Howard. It seems like one neighborhood monster in particular is aiming for the stars, as Cookie Monster has publicly put out an audition to host SNL.

The video is proof that the brilliant minds behind Sesame Street aren’t just making mindless children’s entertainment, as Cookie Monster refers to himself as a glutton and spoofs things like MacGruber, Lady GaGa, and the format of SNL itself. There is even an official Facebook campaign to make this happen. That’s right, this is real.

Not many remember this, but Henson’s Muppets and Lorne Michael’s SNL have a history dating back to the first season of SNL, when the Muppets got their very first time in the spotlight on the show once a week. So before you write the idea off as being another gimicky hosting trend, it could very well happen.

Check out the audition after the jump, and by all means, help Cookie Monster host SNL!

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So I’m standing next to director Andrei Konchalovsky in a walk-in freezer known as the “VodBox,” dedicated to housing dozens of high-end vodkas. We’re all wearing fur coats and somewhat-ridiculous-even-in-frigid-temperatures fur hats.

We’re ostensibly here to discuss Konchalovsky’s latest film, a 3D imagining of The Nutcracker starring Elle Fanning and Nathan Lane, but for now, we’re sampling vodkas. And hoping no one from PETA shows up.

After tasting Konchalovsky’s first selection – a surprisingly smooth shot of “Beluga Noble Russian Vodka” – the director announces he’s done with his VodBox experience. “I’m from Russia…I’ve had enough of the cold!”

It makes sense to me when he says it, but after he leaves, I realize it doesn’t make much sense at all. Shouldn’t a Russian be able to withstand cold temperatures for longer than the rest of us short-sleeved LA weenies?

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