Today's Film News: Sony Feels Venomous

By Katey Rich

Though it's still counting on getting a little extra mileage from the webslinger series by developing a Spider-Man 4, Sony is also trying to move ahead with a spinoff movie based on Venom, a.k.a. Eddie Brock, the villain played by Topher Grace in the most recent spider outing. The Hollywood Reporter says the studio isn't convinced that Grace can topline a big action movie, perhaps forgetting entirely how famous Tobey Maguire was when the first Spider-Man opened.

I had been under the impression that the Bill half of the Bill & Ted duo had disappeared from the face of the Earth after Keanu became famous, but apparently Alex Winter has been hard at work updating-- or perhaps tarnishing?-- the reputation of the Ramones from the 1979 movie Rock 'n Roll High School. Variety reports that Winter and Howard Stern will team up to remake the film, about a rock band helping a group of high schoolers strike back against the principal.

You'll probably never see zombies roaming around Disneyland, but Sam Raimi, the man who made a career on zombies, will be teaming up with Disney for The Transplants, described in the Reporter as "a four-quadrant ensemble superhero story with a comedic bent." Raimi is already a busy guy, and he even recently announced at Comic Con that he was starting work on an Evil Dead 4. Maybe he was just jealous of Guillermo del Toro for getting all the attention by taking on a ton of new projects, so now Raimi is just overcompensating.

And finally, The Hollywood Reporter's Risky Biz blog has some thoughts on the superhero genre, and where it can go from here after the one-two punch of The Dark Knight and Iron Man. They compare it to the Westerns genre, and if their analogy holds, we'll be getting a superhero version of Shane sometime soon. To quote the Nite Owl of the upcoming Watchmen, another superhero movie potentially poised to change the genre, God help us all.