It has been a long road for the film adaptation of the critically acclaimed comic series Y: The Last Man, but it finally looks like things are starting to progress. Dan Trachtenberg has been announced as the director of New Line Cinema’s feature film version of the award winning series by Brian K. Vaughan and Pia Guerra.

A commercial director, Trachtenberg was the co-host of The Totally Rad Show alongside Jeff Cannata and the Nerdist Channel’s Alex Albrecht. He also gained viral fame for his fan-made trailer for Portal: No Escape, which has more than 11.6 million hits on YouTube. You can check that out after the break.

For anyone who hasn’t experienced this fantastic comic, Y: The Last Man takes place in a not too distant future where a mysterious plague has killed every male mammal on Earth except for a snarky amateur magician, Yorick, and his pet monkey, Ampersand. The series won five Eisner awards and has been become beloved among the comic and literature communities alike.

In addition to Trachtenberg behind the camera, the movie adaptation has a script by Matthew Federman & Stephen Scaia. We can only hope everyone involved can do this epic story justice on the big screen.

It’s been nearly ten years since Middle Earth unfurled across the screen, and in that time, the Lord of the Rings films have cemented their place in cinematic history. The actors have aged, technology has evolved, and the influence of Peter Jackson’s trilogy is evidenced in all the three-plus-hour epics we’ve seen over the past decade.

Jackson slips back into this world seamlessly, elevating the grandeur but also reigning it in; instead of army battles and global chaos pitting kings against wizards and demons, this is a merrier tale of Bilbo Baggins, Gandalf, and a band of dwarves hunting a lost treasure guarded by the fierce dragon Smaug.

Smaug, we’re told (and cleverly not shown until the very end) attacked the thriving dwarf city of Erebor years ago, evicting dwarven kind from their homeland (writing that I’m starting to wonder if there’s a parable here, big noses and all…) and forcing them to have it out with every other race in Middle Earth, from the orcs at Moria (the chief of whom kills the leader dwarf, Thorin’s, grandfather and becomes the main antagonist) to the elves at, uh, Elvania (the elves chose not to help the dwarves in the battle against Smaug).

This week’s Monday pick is the 1982 horror classic Alone in the Dark which was the debut film from Jack Sholder (A Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy’s Revenge (1985), The Hidden (1987), and By Dawn’s Early Light (1990). The film stars Jack Palance, Martin Landau, Dwight Schultz, and Donald Pleasence.

Alone in the Dark is one of the most intelligent and generally frightening horror films that came out in the early 1980s, a time where cinema was oversaturated with slasher films like the Halloween or Friday the 13^th franchises. Jack Sholder and fellow writers Robert Shaye and Michael Harrpster created one of the greatest cult horror films that would go on to influence a whole new generation of fans and filmmakers.

Dr. Dan Potter (Dwight Schultz, Murdoch from TVs The A-Team) is hired as a replacement psychiatrist for an institution known as the Haven. The hospital’s owner is Dr. Leo Bain (Pleasence), an unorthodox shrink whose very lenient approaches to the treatment of his patients is met with astonishment by Dr. Potter. Dr. Bain refers to his patients as “voyagers” individuals who are having trouble adapting to an already insane world.

As the two men walk the grounds, Bain shows Dr. Potter the third floor of the hospital where four of the most dangerous “voyagers” are contained with an elaborate electrified security system.  The four men who reside on the third floor are former POW and paranoid schizophrenic Frank Hawkes (Palance), pyromaniac and former preacher Byron Sutcliff (Landau), Obese child molester Ronald Elster (Erland Van Lidth), and Skaggs aka ‘The Bleeder” (Phillip Clark) who hides his face throughout the whole film.

The concept of a new Vacation movie is tricky. On one hand there is juice left in the original franchise, you could bring as much of the original gang back as possible and make a great flick out of it.

On the other hand, remaking the movie might allow it to be more relevant to today’s modern, family vacationing world, which has changed a lot since the original’s early ’80s release.

Well, it looks as if New Line has decided on a bit of compromise between the two concepts. The film will follow Rusty Griswold, Chevy Chase’s son in the series, as he takes his family on the titular trip.

And Variety is reporting that the new Rusty has just been pegged:

Ed Helms is getting ready to continue a Griswold family vacation tradition as the actor is in negotiations to star in New Line’s “Vacation.”… The new version of the vacation adventures of the quirky dad and his family will follow Rusty, who now has his own family misadventures on the road.

Helms is a great actor, and keeping the franchise rooted to the originals is a classy choice. Unless they fail to get Chase and Beverly D’Angelo back for at least a torch passing cameo.

Stay tuned to The Flickcast for any breaking news, as we are watching the development of this one closely and with fingers tightly crossed.

There are few long form comic book stories that really feel like a single cohesive whole. It is just hard to maintain total continuity in style and storytelling over more than a half a decade’s worth of single issues.

Brian K. Vaughn and Pia Guerra were able to accomplish that difficult feat with their epic series Y: The Last Man. A tale told over several years and 60 total issues, that details the last male on earth, and his pet monkey. The comic series is one of the great achievements in comic book storytelling, and is ripe for an adaptation.

The problem is that such an large tale needs more than two hours to tell, and that has slowed the adaptation process down considerably. New Line has been reluctant to sign off on a trilogy of films, but they are still very eager to move forward with a single Y: The Last Man film.

The Hollywood Reporter is reporting that New Line has brought in two new writers to take a new stab at the adaptation:

Writing duo Matthew Federman and Stephen Scaia are in final negotiations to write New Line Cinema’s adaptation of the acclaimed Vertigo comic book… The duo is somewhat new to the feature world but are hot out of the gate – Y is the second studio job in five months after booking Sony’s untitled Zorro origin project — but they have plenty of genre TV credits. Federman and Scaia were writer-producers on Charlie’s Angels, Human Target, Warehouse 13 and Jericho.

Big franchises have a unique set of problems. Shepherds of large, established franchises have to worry about their brand and how it is exposed to the world.

One of the biggest global franchises is The Lord of the Rings, or more specifically the whole of Middle-Earth. It is such a huge franchise there is an entire division of The Saul Zaentz Company set up devoted to Middle-Earth. The division, Middle-Earth Enterprises, is in charge of the license, and it is up to them to maintain it’s integrity.

That’s all well and good, but some times the desire to protect the franchise ends up hurting it. One such instance is the recent attempt by Middle-Earth Enterprises to shut down a popular pub in Southampton, England called The Hobbit.

This Tolkien themed bar is a long established pub that was set up as an homage to the works of Tolkien. The intention was to bring positive new attention to the work in it’s own small way. The folks over at The Saul Zaentz Company have decided enough is enough and wants the bar to stop using the likenesses or pay up.

The original Vacation movie is a bona fide classic. The film was made during the primes of Chevy Chase, John Hughes and Harold Ramis, three of the most prolific names in 80s pop culture. It spawned a hit and miss franchise that most people remember fondly to this day. So this news was inevitable.

The Hollywood Reporter has announced that the guys who wrote Horrible Bosses, John Francis Daley and Jonathan Goldstien, have turned in a script for a new Vacation movie and New Line is keen to give the duo the chance to direct too.

Daley and Goldstein’s Vacation script, first set up in 2009, plays like both a sequel and a reboot of the franchise that began with the 1983 Harold Ramis-directed comedy National Lampoon’s Vacationand continued with European Vacation, Christmas Vacation and Vegas Vacation.

A now grown-up Rusty Griswold, the son of the Chevy Chase character in the original series, experiences a misadventure with his own family.

There have been a lot of Hobbit related stories in the last few days, including the debut of the first teaser for the film. Now in addition to that first footage we are also getting the first one-sheet for the film, just in time for the Christmas cinema rush.

The poster does a great job evoking the sense of starting a grand adventure, and the focus on just Bilbo in Bag End is appropriate. Compared to the first Lord of the Rings one-sheet that focused on Frodo and the ring, this poster feels right as the beginning of the whole saga. The dutch angle and harsh lighting might seem a rather odd choice at first, but then you realize how off putting an uncomfortable leaving the Shire is for Bilbo and it all makes sense.

Everything we have seen from this movie up to this point has been amazing, it is finally starting to feel like there is a new Peter Jackson directed Tolkien film coming in less than a year. This poster helps set the tone for a two year adventure that brings us back into the glorious world of Middle Earth.

You can see The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey next year and the full poster after the jump.

There’s an old saying that goes something like “don’t fix something if it isn’t broken”. The people that manage Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson’s career obviously know this saying very well. When he broke the bank in Disney’s The Game Plan, they thought it may be a good idea to use him in a reboot of the classic Escape from Witch Mountain film.

That movie raked in millions as well, so what’s next? How about a sequel to a film from only a few years ago that was so bad, it forced Brendan Fraser out of the acting game completely. That’s where Journey 2: The Mysterious Island comes into play. Here’s the Rock-centered premise.

Young adventurer Sean (Josh Hutcherson) receives a coded distress signal from a mysterious island where no island should exist–a place of strange life forms, mountains of gold, deadly volcanoes, and more than one astonishing secret. Unable to stop him from going, Sean’s new stepfather (Johnson) joins the quest. Together with a helicopter pilot (Guzman( and his beautiful, strong-willed daughter (Vanessa Hudgens), they set out to find the island, rescue its lone inhabitant (Caine) and escape before seismic shock waves force the island under the sea and bury its treasures forever.

Can this franchise be saved by Dwayne’s comedic charm? Or will this fall under the umbrella of “bad ideas” that New Line has masterminded over the past years? Decide for yourself after the jump with the first trailer. Journey 2 hits theaters February 10th.

The music from the Lord of the Rings films might very well be the best ever written for a film. Howard Shore often considered the entire project as his opera, structured in a sweeping and broad style that worked hand in hand with the epic story. So it is a natural that 10 years later the music is still exciting fans around the globe.

The music has been revisited again, this time being constructed as a symphony in six movements. The full twelve hours of music from the original films has been pared down into the six movements, each reflecting one of the six books of the original Lord of the Rings novel.

“Maestro Ludwig Wicki personally selected the musicians who comprise The 21st Century Symphony Orchestra and who perform on this recording,” said Shore. “Over the past four years he has perfected this music in Lucerne, Switzerland. His precision and supreme musicianship is evident throughout the recording. I congratulate him on his success and thank him for his masterful approach in bringing this score to life.”