Max Landis’s Death and Return of Superman is a very long sketch. No, it’s a really funny short film. No, you know what it’s like? It’s like, after a long night of gaming, when you’re hanging with your best nerd friends having a laugh, debating movies and video games and all things geeky. Tie all that together into a 17 minute short film and you’ve got The Death and Return of Superman.

Screenwriter Max Landis (Chronicle) decided to film his late night nerd philippic and brought some familiar friends along for the ride.

Death and Return of Superman, affectionately dubbed DAROS, cuts back and forth between Landis recounting the story of Big Blue’s demise directly to the camera and live-action re-enactments by actors using Landis’s voice (much in the style of the Drunk History series).

The star-studded short features Mandy Moore, Morgan Krantz, Elijah Wood, Elden Henson, Dustin Romero, Matt Bennett, Zach Cregger, and Jimmi Simpson in key roles. Sharp-eyed viewers can also spot cameos by Simon Pegg, Sarah Shahi, Whitney Moore, Chloe Dykstra, Micah Sloate, Chris Hardwick, and Ron Howard. 

Check out the full film, which was released for free on YouTube Friday, after the jump.

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More and more, YouTube is become less of a place to watch cats beat up other cats, and more of a place to watch premium content that you are lucky to get for free on demand. In the past few years, one of those premium content trends has been “supercuts” and “movie mashups” where talented editors take clips from films and put them all together in one splendid masterpiece (if we do say so ourselves).

With that, one talented YouTuber named Kees van Dijkjuizen, an 18 year old films student from the Netherlands, who has been doing two series. One of which is a year-in-review Cinema supercut, that he’s done every year since 2008, and the other is his [the films of] series in which he showcases some of the most critically acclaimed directors of our time, from Christopher Nolan, to Tim Burton, and Ridley Scott.

His latest cut is the finale of the latter series, and it’s is a dedication to Steven Spielberg. This was a big one for him, which he lays out in the description.

Film as we know it today was shaped by thousands of creative minds working together to create something special for the audience to experience. Among those is Steven Spielberg; considered by many to be the true master of modern day cinema, Spielberg’s 26 feature films have each taken us to magical worlds, introduced us to fantastic characters and on adventures we will never forget. [the films of] has honored many filmmakers, but none of them as significant to film history as the genius featured in this final episode.

Take a look at the supercut after the jump, and check out his YouTube channel here.

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Call of Duty Elite is a service that allows the most hardcore Call of Duty players to lose themselves in some pretty advance stat tracking and multiplayer progression. Now those gamers have even less of a reason to spend any time away from their account with the launch of the iOS app for the service.

The new app will be free for all registered users, and is available on all iOS platforms today. An android version is going to be hitting soon as well.

Immerse yourself in Call of Duty® wherever you go with the Call of Duty® ELITE mobile app. Evaluate your multiplayer progress with in-depth stat analysis. Formulate new strategies based on your recent performance and remotely incorporate edits to your loadouts. Push your changes directly into Call of Duty®: Modern Warfare® 3 so you’re always ready to play.

Check out a list of features and some screen shots after the jump.

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In the next couple of weeks a very interesting new movie will be hitting theaters nationwide. What makes Haywire so intriguing is that it has a fantastic pedigree, yet it is being released in the January doldrums. Normally this would speak to the poor quality of the movie, but early word has been strong and it is hard to bet against Steven Soderbergh.

The movie is released in a couple weeks, but to help drum up more excitment the first five minutes of the movie have been released on Hulu. For those of you who are unaware of what the film is about, here is the synopsis:

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The Holiday Season is a great time for films, but on the cusp of one of the more anticipate years in cinema history, it is the trailers for 2012 films that might be the highlight. One film that fans are eagerly awaiting is Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight Rises, sequel to the instant classic that took the world by storm in 2008.

The first long form trailer was released a few weeks ago, and now some adventurous do-gooders have taken upon themselves to recreate the magic in their own “sweded” version of the trailer. Complete with action figure action shots, and an ingenious football stadium collapse scene made with paper cut outs.

The sweded trailer is great, but we implore you to check out their youtube channel. There are more sweded trailers for your viewing pleasure and a really interesting side-by-side that plays the sweded trailer next to the original. It is extremely interesting to see it play with the original right next to it, showing how accurate these guys get with their shot construction and timing.

There are also a couple of funny little jabs at the original hidden within the sweded version of the trailer which is part of why these can be so charming. Particularly, the chanting of “que pasa,” golden stuff. You can check out the sweded Dark Knight Rises Trailer after the jump.

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Drunk History is back on the web, but this time they’re showing the holiday spirit with guest stars Ryan Gosling, Eva Mendes, and Jim Carrey.

The mother of all video game fan films has arrived as the Left 4 Dead flick hits the web. Be sure to stick around till the end for some awesome gaming cameos.

Speaking of fan films, we stumbled across the best real life gaming adaptation in the history of the web. Say hello to Battlefield 3 In Real Life.

It’s Christmas time everywhere in the world (well, almost everywhere), even in Arkham City. But instead of visits from a man in red, they get a famous caped crusader.

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• Michel Gondry got tired of the studios taking too long for the expected remake, so he decided to make his own low-budget remake of Taxi Driver. Here’s the trailer.

• Fans may have hated Nic Cage’s original Ghost Rider film, but with Crank’s Neveldine and Taylor on the sequel, and this trailer looking amazing, we can’t help but get excited.

• Dario Argento has earned the respect of horror and crime fans everywhere, but even he can’t expect us to ignore the putridness of this trailer for Dracula 3D. What was he thinking?

• A brand new fan trailer with giant robots has hit the web, and this time it only cost $150. The difference? It looks better than some multi-million dollar pictures.

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The Amazing Spider-Man is one of the biggest upcoming movies of 2012. As anticipation continues to grow, Sony has unveiled the official website for the new web-slining blockbuster. Most noteworthy on the site are a series of new stills and a synopsis that promises more Spider-Man films in this new universe.

“Like most teenagers his age, Peter is trying to figure our who he is and how he got to be the person he is today. In his journey to put the pieces of his past togetherhe uncovers a secret that his father held… a secret that will ultimately shape his destiny as Spider-Man. This is the first in a series of movies that tells a different side of the Peter Parker story. On July 3rd, 2012, the untold story begins.”

The movie is going to be a very important step in the evolution of the comic-book movie. Up to this point comic book movies have generally held to the Hollywood rules of modern franchises, but one of the aspects of the comic book medium that keeps these characters relevant for so long is their ability to adapt and evolve on the fly. Even if that means rebooting a character that is still incredibly popular.

If The Amazing Spider-Man is a hit than we can see studios more willing to allow new filmmakers a chance at established characters with out waiting for the character to grow stale in it’s current style. The movie is set to hit theaters July 3rd, 2012.

While the world of film and TV awards get more and more jaded to the hardcore fans, it’s time to pay more attention to the forms of media that could, very soon, become the new medium to-be. I’m talking about the form of New Media, or “web series”, which is becoming more and more of what kids are talking about these days.

With that comes, of course, a cornocopia of popular awards to give accolades to these hard-working men and women. One of these is for the The International Academy of Web Television, a freshman organization that’s made to bring more attention to the growing medium.

Yesterday, the nomimations for the first year of awards was announced, and as expected, Sean Becker & Felicia Day’s popular web series The Guild, and the excellent drama series RCVR made out like bandits. From Variety.

“RCVR” racked up a dozen nominations. The show focuses on covert government agents that try to suppress the truth about extraterrestrial encounters and hunt humans selected by an alien species to act as channels for advanced technologies. “The Guild,” a long-running Web series that is arguably the field’s most popular, picked up nine nominations.

Voting is currently underway and the show hits on January 12th in Vegas the upcoming CES. Take a look at the full nominees after the jump.

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Retro is all the rage these days. Whether it’s music, clothes, or technology, the times, they aren’t a-changin’ as we grow more nostalgic about the days of yore. That’s why it’s even cooler to see classic TV tropes make their way onto the newest form of entertainment and storytelling: web series.

This is where DANGER 5 comes in. The brand new web miniseries is everything we loved (and laughed about) from shows like The Avengers, Mission: Impossible, Thunderbirds are GO! and several other classically campy series from the 60′s. Here’s a brief synopsis.

Set in a bizarre, 1960′s inspired version of World War II, action comedy series DANGER 5 follows a team of five spies on a mission to kill Adlolf Hitler.

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Welcome to another edition of On the Radar where we delve into all corners of the entertainment, tech and geek Internets for news, views and whatnot that may have escaped our regular coverage during the week. Let is know if we missed something interesting.

• It looks like Bryan Singer’s upcoming Battlestar Galactica movie is becoming more of a reality as Universal is seconds away from inking a deal with a writer.

• In more “things that need to be made” news, Sony has green lit an Assassin’s Creed film. Let’s hope 90% of it is just building-jumping

• Speaking of games-soon-to-be-movies, here is 6 minutes of Harrison Ford playing Uncharted 3. Why? Because why not.

• For a simple $50, you too can own an exclusive Chewbacca statue made purely of chewing tobacco (Chewbacco?). The only question left is: why would you?

• What happens when the Sin City trailer is set to a cast of characters from the Disney universe? Pure amazement.

• Love The Walking Dead? Then you’ll love The Walken Dead about a billion times more. Trust us.

• Speaking of things we love, what would happen if Joss Whedon’s The Avengers trailer only had a budget of $16? This is the product of that question.

• Nerdy, cuddly things are kind of the best. At least, that’s how we’re able to justify a plush version of Portal’s turret gun.

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Film remakes are something that we’ve all grown accustomed to over the years but with two major releases last week both being remakes, Footloose and The Thing, have we reached the breaking point? Is no film safe from a remake? Is it only time before we see Howard the Duck remade with a CGI duck a la The Smurfs? The new pop-culture debate show GeekDown discuss the pitfalls and necessary evils of remaking classic, or not so classic, films.

Jonathan London of Geekscape.net sits in the guest chair this week to give his insight on why piracy is causing the massive influx of remakes in recent years.

The trailer for Joss Whedon’s Avengers hit the internet this week and fanboys around the world had to change their pants. We manage to calm ourselves for a few minutes and dissect the trailer to make sense of why Thor is about to bring the hammer down on Captain America, why there’s so much Tony Stark, and why Loki hates cars so much.

If that wasn’t enough for one show, Mass Effect 3 Multiplayer is also up for discussion. After a drawn out “will they, won’t they” situation worthy of any sitcom, BioWare finally announced that they will have multiplayer in next year’s hotly anticipated Mass Effect 3.

Is it the final step towards making the game of the year or is it just an afterthought to sell more $10 online passes? Find out what we think on this episode of GeekDown after the jump.

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