Ryan Reynolds is a pretty busy guy. Not only is casting news and general buzz generating for his titular role in DC’s upcoming Green Lantern, but the writers have already been hired for the Deadpool script, which will begin shooting when he’s done donning his emerald ring.

Somewhere in there, he’s had the time to shoot Rodrigo Cortés’ thriller about a U.S. contractor who’s kidnapped by a group of Iraqis and buried alive. The film has already gotten plenty of buzz from Sundance, but may have the same misfortune that The Hurt Locker got at the Golden Globes.

The very first teaser trailer for the film has been released, which almost takes a turn in a viral direction. In the film, Reynolds is stuck underground, in his own would-be tomb, with only a lighter and a cell phone. One can’t imagine that this film cost Transformers money.

Check out the teaser trailer after the jump, and expect to hear more about a U.S. release date as studios bid for distribution rights.

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With the unbridled success of this fall’s Paranormal Activity, it seemed a sure thing that director Oren Peli’s next project would be an instant pickup for the studio, and that theory has proven to be true. According to Variety, Paramount recently bought the distribution rights for Peli’s Area 51, which reportedly again utilizes Paranormal Activity’s “handicam” style of shooting. According to the trade:

“51, which completed principal photography three weeks ago, was fully financed by Incentive and the Aramid Entertainment Fund. Latter is a co-financing partner of Par’s slate on films that include the ‘Transformers’ films.

The film employs the ‘found footage’ narrative structure that Peli used in ‘Paranormal Activity’ to tell the story of three teens whose curiosity leads them to the notorious Area 51 portion of Nellis Air Force Base in the Nevada desert.”

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Whether you understand Twitter or not, it’s hard to argue the phenomenal success of the social web site. For those few of you who don’t know, Twitter is an online service that allows you to follow other people’s message “stream,” sharing thoughts, comments and web links 140 characters at a time. It’s sort of like instant messaging but instead of isolated conversations you’re speaking to a crowd (although, you can send messages to individuals if you want).

While it has been around since 2006, Twitter really picked up mainstream momentum this year. Moving beyond your standard web service, the social tool has become a platform for communication. Corporations and consumers alike now broadcast everything from product sales to thoughts on the latest films. It’s that last point I want to focus on.

The L.A. Times ran an interesting story about the “Twitter Effect” on movies. That being, how talking about films on Twitter may effect moviegoers and influence their movie watching choices. Take the data at face value and Twitter sounds like it may not be the smart bomb of film criticism everyone thinks it is:

“OTX did an online survey of nearly 1,500 moviegoers in mid- September, the bulk of the sample being moviegoers from age 13 to 49, the key moviegoing demographic group. When asked what was the most influential source for word of mouth, most respondents picked “family and friends and coworkers,” which scored 40%, followed by Facebook (31%), MySpace (9%), IMDB (8%), with Twitter and online message boards bringing up the rear with 6% each.”

I completely disagree. Why? Simply put, the study is inherently flawed. OTX went and separated sites like Twitter and Facebook from the “family and friends and coworkers” category which fails to recognize the fact most of the information we get from those two social sites are from family and friends and coworkers. Take that into consideration and it stands to reason Twitter is making up a portion of that 40% belonging to the other category.

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The world of viral marketing has become quite it’s own beast over the past five years. Many remember 2007’s Dark Knight viral marketing and how clowns took over dozens of cities in the U.S., and how the Cloverfield marketing had everybody stirring for weeks on what the movie was actually about. It looks like James Cameron and his team at Fox have now started up the viral machine for his newest film, Avatar.

The site, which is aptly named AVTR.com, follows the government program that puts humans into their AVATAR bodies, allowing them the edge they need to fight on the alien planet Pandora. AVTR.com is pretty bare-bones at this point, leaving us with some set designs of Pandora, a “recruiting” page where you can sign up for the program (or just a mailing list), a viral video convincing you to enlist, and links to the Twitter and Facebook.

As far as viral marketing goes, this site isn’t breaking ground. There is only one video on the page, and just because you throw some static at the beginning and end of a trailer, doesn’t make it “viral”. Fox hasn’t been the best at marketing to begin with, considering their work on X-Men Origins: Wolverine and Street Fighter: The Legend of Chun Li.

The attempt at going viral is only proof that gorilla or viral marketing shouldn’t be left in the hands of gigantic studios or companies like Coca-Cola. Instead, leave this side of movie promotion to independent studios and films like District 9 and Paranormal Activity.

Yesterday, a few movies sites (JoBlo and FirstShowing.net) received some awesome packages from Disney PR, containing some AWESOME viral marketing schwag for 2011’s Tron sequel. Tron will be at Comic-Con on Thursday, and in preparation, some sites received not only some completely badass Flynn’s Arcade tokens, but a USB thumb drive containing an animated gif file with a coded message.

I found three of the four different gif files yesterday and was able to figure out about 80% of the coded message (it used unicode characters in place of the alphabet), but needed the final file to complete the code. I stopped messing with stuff early in the afternoon, since I didn’t get any schwag myself (Disney, CALL ME), but early this morning, the minds of the Internet came together and two new “Tron” related websites were unleashed!

The two sites are http://homeoftron.com and http://flynnlives.com and both are absolutely fantastic relics for any fan of the 1982 animated-classic. HomeofTron is set-up as sort of a memorial to Flynn’s Arcade (which according to the website’s new section, closed in 1990, *sniff*), whereas FlynnLives has more obvious ties with the upcoming film. Not only does it have Kevin Flynn sightings (for the uninitiated, Kevin Flynn was one of the main characters in the original Tron), it also has a little spider at the bottom of the website that includes a timer and instructions for where to meet up at Comic-Con.

Chris and Matt, you better hit that spot! According to Disney’s previous press releases and announcements at Cine Expo International, the Tron sequel should land in theaters sometime in 2011.