Although we're chalking this up to the overeager and rarely reliable British press (England & Scotland, I love you, but your tabloids are crazy), it bears reporting anyway. According to The Telegraph, Cher is said to be in talks with Christopher Nolan to play Catwoman in the third Batman film.

Says some anonymous studio executive: "Cher is Nolan's first choice to play Catwoman. He wants to her to portray her like a vamp in her twilight years. The new Catwoman will be the absolute opposite of Michelle Pfeiffer and Halle Berry's purring creations."

The same article also reports Johnny Depp as having signed to play the Riddler -- and we all know that isn't true. No one knows which villains will appear in the third film. Even Nolan's participation is still up in the air, despite all of this breathless casting speculation, fan art, and fierce "Will they work in Nolan's gritty real-world setting?" debate.

Now, don't get me wrong -- I actually love Cher and I think she could make a pretty cool Catwoman. But if Nolan does do a third film, and if he does include Catwoman, I want an actress that's closer in age to Christian Bale. I'm not trying to be ageist, it's more that I see Catwoman's career as being a parallel to Batman's, much like the Joker. I want that Batman: Year One story. But should they ever make The Dark Knight Returns (and there was much chatter after Comic Con that Frank Miller and Zack Snyder were at some kind of unofficial agreement on making it, so who knows), I nominate Cher to be the retired Selina Kyle. An older Catwoman deserves someone as awesome as Cher to play her -- not the broken down wreck she was in the book. What do you think, readers? Cher for Catwoman and Nolan, or do you prefer the Angelina Jolie fantasy casting?

Dark Castle Entertainment is an odd little beast of a production outfit. Headed by uber-producer Joel Silver (Lethal Weapon, Die Hard, The Matrix), the company originally focused on horror remakes (House on Haunted Hill, House of Wax) and originals (Gothika, The Reaping). More recently they branched out to a wider variety of material (Guy Ritchie's RocknRolla, Dominic Sena's Whiteout). Their next two projects, however, will be solidly horror-based.

ShockTilYouDrop reports that All Cheerleaders Die, a horror-comedy, and "another chapter in the House on Haunted Hill saga," possibly a prequel, are under development. No writers or directors are signed at this point. Evidently the company is also mulling over other sequels to properties they developed at Warner Brothers.

In October 2006, Dark Castle entered into an agreement with finance company CIT whereby CIT would finance 15 feature films over six years with a projected budget of $15-$40 million for each picture. According to the deal, Silver has has sole creative control, and Warner Brothers would distribute. RocknRolla and Whiteout were made under that deal, but Silver has recently been shopping RocknRolla around to other distributors, reportedly because Warner Brothers thought the flick was "very English."

Dark Castle has some turkeys on its resume, but who doesn't? I like their past emphasis on dark, brooding, adult-skewing horror, even if the films didn't always succeed. (And, really, who can deny the genuis of Paris Hilton in House of Wax?) So I'm cautiously optimistic about their upcoming projects. Do you have any feelings, one way or another?

It's kind of cute to see DC Comics and Warner Bros. getting all excited about making superhero movies again now that The Dark Knight has been established as the greatest, most important film in the history of mankind. This comes after a decade of almost every DC-based movie being a failure while most of what has come from rival camp Marvel Comics has been successful. Now the tables have turned -- or they have for one movie, anyway -- and DC is emboldened. The next step? Find a way to ruin Superman again!

Word came last week that DC and Warners will reboot the Superman franchise, similar to the way Marvel rebooted the Incredible Hulk. (And gee, look how great that turned out! This summer's The Incredible Hulk did just as well at the box office as 2003's supposedly disastrous Hulk did.) Warner honcho Jeff Robinov said they plan to "reintroduce" the character -- but reboot, reintroduce, whatever you call it, are they forgetting that that's what 2006's Superman Returns was? How many times do they think they can redo this character before audiences just give up altogether?

Plenty of questions remain. A reboot probably means an entirely new cast, and possibly a new director. Word on the street before last week's announcement was that Bryan Singer could stay on board if he was willing to go in the new direction, but that's not very helpful right now, since no one knows what the new direction is yet.

Movie studios are big on protecting their intellectual property, which is certainly understandable -- but sometimes they come down too hard. Take this new case. Warner Bros. is suing to stop the Indian release of a domestic film called Hari Puttar: A Comedy of Terrors. Why? Because Hari Puttar is close to Harry Potter, obviously, and Warners damn well owns the film rights to Harry Potter.

Sounds fair enough -- except that the movie has nothing to do with Harry Potter, and doesn't even appear to be an attempt to capitalize on the Potter brand name. As best I can determine, "Hari Puttar" is the endearing nickname of a 10 year-old character named Hari Prasad Dhoonda. The movie itself appears to be an action-adventure fantasy, about a resourceful kid who saves his dad's top secret computer chip from some burglars -- sort of like a modern, Indian Home Alone. The title references Harry Potter, but there's no theft here; the closest parallel is Son of Rambow, which managed to avoid a lawsuit (reportedly by adding the "w" to the end of "Rambo").

Warners, of course, has to fight this battle in Indian courts, so it's hard to predict what's going to happen. But Harry Potter is such a prominent part of the zeitgeist all over the world, that the company may have a lot of battles on its hands if it chooses to go after every incident such as this.

If it had any other title, Lost Boys 2: The Tribe wouldn't provoke any outrage. But if it had any other title, would anybody give it a second glance? I harbored a ray of hope, but it doesn't take very long to realize that Lost Boys 2: The Tribe was always destined for the direct to video garbage heap.

The 1987 original, photographed by the superbly talented Michael Chapman, was super stylish and jammed with juicy performances, cynical wisecracks, and post-modern tweaks to cinematic vampire legends. The best idea was placing fanged lords of the night in a sun-soaked California coastal town populated by aging hippies and freaks, not to mention a boardwalk, rollercoaster, and great, crashing surf.

As a budget sequel, LB2 has to make do with less attractive, less flattering video imagery and the rockier Canadian coastline standing in for "Santa Carla" * (actually, Santa Cruz, California). The script by Hans Rodionoff makes some half-hearted attempts to tie in the original (antlers and motorcycles, anyone?), but is bereft of any new twists of its own. Director P. J. Pesce makes certain to include the obligatory amount of gore required to justify the so-called "uncut" version, with notable attention to ripped throats and spilled intestines, along with bared body parts displayed by lovelies such as Moneca Delain. LB2 has precisely two good moments -- one in the opening scene, provided by Tom Savini -- stranded within 94 minutes of running time.

So much for Warner Bros really taking their time deciding what to do with the Man of Steel! Group President Jeff Robinov confirmed to The Wall Street Journal that they plan on rebooting the franchise, a'la The Incredible Hulk. "Superman [Returns] didn't quite work as a film in the way that we wanted it to," says Robinov. "It didn't position the character the way he needed to be positioned. Had Superman worked in 2006, we would have had a movie for Christmas of this year or 2009. But now the plan is just to reintroduce Superman without regard to a Batman and Superman movie at all."

The plan is to release four comic book movies in the next three years -- including a third Batman (no word on whether Nolan is returning), a new Superman, and two other unnamed DC characters. Robinov also confirmed that Warner Bros plans to adopt the Marvel route of a single film for each character, and then building on those origin films to create crossover stories, rather than just jumping into the deep end of the Justice League pool. The only worrying part about Warner Bros new plan is that they are still drunk on The Dark Knight, and want their superhero films to follow that mold. Robinov feels that "exploring the evil side to characters" is the way to approach all the DC characters. "We're going to try to go dark to the extent that the characters allow it." Including Superman.

As most of you noted in the comments, and as anyone distantly familiar with the character knows, a gritty approach is really not the one to take with Superman. He's the good old boy, an American icon, the complete opposite of Batman. He's also, arguably, one of the easiest characters to make into a family friendly comic book film. Superman is ideal for kids because he lacks the moral gray areas Batman revels in -- or should. I'm glad they're rebooting, but I'm wary of the dark direction they plan on taking.

[via SuperheroHype.com and thanks to Eli Gutierrez]

No one seems to know how to feel about Guy Ritchie's Sherlock Holmes -- it has Robert Downey Jr. in the lead, and yet the buzz is curiously off. Of course, it's difficult to get too excited about a movie that dodges its source material in favor of a comic book that has yet to be released. It puts discussion in a bit of a nowhere land.

But, I'm going to try anyway. Ritchie talked a bit about the Victorian reboot to USA Today. "It will be a very big production, visceral and intellectual," Ritchie said. "His brilliance will percolate into the action. His intellect was as much of a curse as it was a blessing. He was a deeply layered character." And he's not particularly concerned about Sasha Baron Cohen's comedic version. "They don't even have a script yet. We are way ahead."

And how did they snag the Iron Man-of-the-Moment? Downey Jr. became involved due to his wife, Susan, who is one of RocknRolla's producers, and an early fan of the film. His English accent, Ritchie insists "is flawless." I hope it's improved since his Restoration days.

While USA Today says there's no word on the casting of the villain, Digital Spy was reporting (via Ritchie at Empire's BFI Movie-Con) that the honor was going to Mark Strong. But there has been no official confirmation of that, and Warner Bros refused to even comment. Casting is expected to be finished in six weeks. But what characters from the Conan Doyle canon will appear is a mystery. Ritchie hasn't confirmed the appearance of Professor Moriarty, but he has said there will be a love interest based on Irene Adler, who appeared in the original Holmes story A Scandal in Bohemia. Holmes' admiration for Adler is legendary -- and it speaks well to Ritchie and Lionel Wigram's take that they are including such well known characters.

Join me in being cautiously optimistic about this project. After all, the film world is always harping on Ritchie to break his gangster mold, so let's support him when he does.