My hunch is Catherine Hardwicke's movie of Twilight is going to be huge. The Stephenie Meyer book is a vampire young adult phenom all over the world. And Kristen Stewart is the star.

Of all the Vanity Fair flavors-of-the-month, she's the one I've been watching. Jon Favreau cast her in Zathura, and she popped. You also saw her in Doug Liman's Jumpers, Sean Penn's Into the Wild and she's coming up in Barry Levinson's What Just Happened? Twilight is the tenth pic she's made since Zathura, and it will make her a star. Summit will release December 12. And sequels are already in the offing.

Ordinarily, you'd expect to see on the fall fest circuit Sam Mendes' Revolutionary Road, which stars Mendes' wife, Kate Winslet, and Leonardo DiCaprio, together for the first time since Titanic.

But the Scott-Rudin-produced adaptation of the Richard Yates novel won't be finished in time for Telluride, Toronto or New York because Mendes has been shooting the Focus Features comedy tentatively called Farlanders this summer, a road movie set for 2009 release co-written by Dave Eggers and his wife Vendela Vida, starring John Krasinski and Maggie Gyllenhaal SNL's Maya Rudolph as a young couple seeking the perfect place to bring up their new baby. Maggie Gyllenhaal also stars.

Mendes will return to the editing bay around Labor Day to do the final mix on Revolutionary Road, which DreamWorks/Paramount Vantage will open at year's end. Mendes wanted to squeeze in a pre-strike movie because he has two BBC Shakespeare productions to direct back-to-back in London.

Mendes' next feature film is Andrew Davies' adaptation of my favorite work of literature, bar none: George Elliot's Middlemarch, for DreamWorks.

And Eggers' (A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius) other upcoming movie is his adaptation of Maurice Sendak's Where the Wild Things Are, for director Spike Jonze, which has been pushed back to 2009.

Wall-E has earned a consensus of reviews that will be hard to beat for best-reviewed pic of 2008. Until Wall-E, Iron Man had 93 % fresh reviews on Rotten Tomatoes. Wall-E has 97 %.

The tsunami of love pouring over Wall-E is leading some to wonder if the pic might not be competitive enough to go for a best picture Oscar. Pixar has had many releases in this best-reviewed category over the years. What would make this one any different?

Meanwhile, Hitsville runs down various critics who are are avoiding dealing with what happens to the human race in Wall-E. Bill Wyman seems to be missing the fact that some critics decided to keep back some of the reveals in the last part of the movie. What happens to humans in Wall-E was a big surprise for me. Going in, I didn't know that part of the story, so I was delighted and amazed by much of what I was seeing.

Critics do not have to tell their readers every detail of the movie. UPDATE: Nor do trailers have to reveal every plot twist.

Another Wall-E factoid: Fred Willard is the first live actor to be included in a Pixar movie. He's on video, scratchy and wobbly, but is he technically animated? He is utterly recognizable as Fred Willard.

Sci-Fi Wire posts a never-before-seen interview conducted with the late great sci-fi author Arthur C. Clarke, author of 2001: A Space Odyssey and Childhood's End. The interview was conducted in 2001.

Warner Bros. is not releasing The Women in the fall. Picturehouse is.

Outgoing Picturehouse exec Bob Berney persuaded the studio to give him a bigger budget to take The Women wide on September 12 in 1500-2000 situations. "The trailer gets great response," says Berney, who wants to create a Sex and the City-style "bring your girlfriends" opening weekend femme event.

Here's the trailer:

What do the movies Wanted and Eagle Eye have in common? They're fish-out-of-water scenarios that posit that an everyday schmuck --James McAvoy in one, Shia LaBeouf in the other--gets caught up in something exciting and scary involving a lot of action and danger and guns. It's the oldest trick in the book.

But the commercial recipe here is also to take a star with cred with the young male demo that opens movies (In Wanted's case, it's actually Angelina Jolie) and add them to the thriller genre mix with an older star (Wanted's Morgan Freeman, Eagle Eye's Billy Bob Thornton).

DreamWorks took this story idea by Steven Spielberg, got it written by John Glenn & Travis Adam Wright, Hillary Seitz and Dan McDermott, and when Spielberg didn't want to direct, added their Disturbia star-on-the-rise LaBeouf to the mix with his director, D. J. Caruso.

Here's the trailer for Eagle Eye, due in September.

DreamWorks should only dream that Eagle Eye does as well as Wanted--a great match of strong narrative and fab visual style that raises it above the ordinary--otherwise it's just another formula thriller.

Universal threw yet another Westwood block party premiere Saturday night, this time for $100-million summer sequel Hellboy 2: The Golden Army, the closer of the Los Angeles Film Fest, which lured some 100,000 attendees, up from last year. Hellboy 2 director Guillermo del Toro handed out two jury prizes worth $50,000 each to documentary filmmaker Darius Marder (Loot) and feature director Sean Baker (Prince of Broadway).

His "insanely ambitious movie" Hellboy 2, Del Toro said, "comes from an exotic country inside my brain and my gonads. People think I do two types of movies: strange little Spanish films and big studio movies. This movie comes from a different place. It's the first of those big movies that belongs to the same world as Pan's Labyrinth. The imagination in it is unbridled."

True enough. Hellboy 2 is a hybrid of those two things. And thus some moviegoers, especially the core fanboys who loved the Dark Horse comics and the first installment, will embrace Hellboy 2's fantastic eccentricities, while others will be left behind, scratching their heads. I doubt the visually sumptuous pic will break out into wide acceptance, especially given the stiff summer competition. The first Hellboy was not a global hit in 2004 (it topped out at $98 million worldwide) but sold well over the years on DVD.

At the party, Del Toro admitted that the film's war between the ancient magical underground universe and modern humans is far from black-and-white. Like Del Toro himself, red-skinned warrior Hellboy (Ron Perlman) is ambivalent, caught between the rich primal forces that spawned him and his powerful human masters. Here's the trailer:

No matter how well this movie does, Del Toro is about to enter a new fantasy portal that will take four years of his life: J.R.R. Tolkien's The Hobbit. Working closely with producers Peter Jackson and Fran Walsh, phase one will involve writing for three weeks in L.A., one week in Wellywood, phase two will reverse that (one week in L.A., three weeks in Wellywood) and then the directing and post-production phases will take Del Toro to New Zealand full time.

Here's the filmmaker's two-part Q & A at LAFF.

For his part, critic John Anderson likes Hellboy 2 a lot:

But the reason the movie plays so well has nothing to do with the leading man's paternal instincts; rather, it's rooted in del Toro's rococo instincts for the stylishly creepy and crawlingly macabre, his clockmaker's preoccupation with detail, and a flair for combining state-of-the-art technology with his taste for the antique, the gothic, the Catholic. Not to disparage the f/x guys, but what's onscreen in "Hellboy II" is all about the seismic eruptions in del Toro's head. Comparing his work to most fantasy cinema is like comparing cave drawings to the Cathedral of Cologne.

Jack Lechner, an occasional contributor to this blog, wonders if anyone else has ever matched Pixar's nine-for-nine winning streak. Every Pixar movie has now opened at No. 1.

Wall-E, which earned a 97% fresh rating on Rotten Tomatoes and scored the third-highest opening for a Pixar picture this weekend, could even give Iron Man a run for the number-one summer blockbuster crown. (UPDATE: So far it's not pulling little kids in the numbers it would need to accomplish that.)

Here's Lechner's query. Readers, any ideas?

Having seen and loved WALL-E, I find myself wondering whether anyone else in the entire history of cinema -- a production company, a studio, a star, a writer, a director -- has ever made nine great movies in a row; nine big hits in a row; or, especially, nine great movies in a row that were also hits.

Every one of my personal cinematic heroes -- Wilder, Bergman, Altman -- had a strikeout now and then. Woody Allen never made nine winners in a row; nor did Hitchcock, Ford, Truffaut, or Godard. Even Mr. Consistency, Eric Rohmer, never made nine greats in a row, at least to my taste. (If you take "The Decalogue" as ten separate movies, then Kieslowski's streak is off the charts -- but since only two of the ten episodes can function as stand-alone feature films, I don't think it counts.) I've never seen AIR FORCE; if it's great, then Howard Hawks at least ties Pixar with a nine-film streak from BRINGING UP BABY to RED RIVER. But if it isn't, then all bets are off.

In recent years, Alexander Payne has made four great movies in a row -- but can he keep it up for another five? Rob Reiner's first seven films were all aces in my book -- but then there's NORTH. I know Armond White will readily testify on behalf of Spielberg's last nine films (which would take us back to AMISTAD) -- but I hated WAR OF THE WORLDS as much as I loved MUNICH. Tom Hanks had a twelve-film streak of massive hits from A LEAGUE OF THEIR OWN to CAST AWAY, if you don't count THAT THING YOU DO -- but why wouldn't you? And then there are the actors -- Jeff Bridges snaps to mind -- who give consistently great performances in film after film, but not always in great films.

Unless you or your readers can come up with a rival, I'm betting that Pixar is having the single most impressive streak of all time.

The trick here is to recognize that Pixar thrives on teamwork, much as the old studios did. But Pixar releases one movie a year, which takes about four years to make. The entire team works on every movie, even if one or two people get director credit. Wall-E's Andrew Stanton also wrote and directed Finding Nemo. Here's animation expert Peter Debruge's Pixar story for Popular Mechanics.com.

Remember Michael Arndt, the screenwriter who delivered Little Miss Sunshine right off the bat? He went to work for Pixar because they boast the best writers of original screenplays in the film business. John Lasseter understood from the start that story had to be wed with huge entertainment value, family-friendly accessibility, great characters, as well as huge craftsmanship on the animation side.

Go up to visit Pixar--as I have several times, since my first feature in EW on Toy Story--and you see toys and bicycles and gizmos and artwork everywhere. It is a magical fun place. They work hard and play hard.

Hollywood could learn from them. The current thinking about the studios' future involves cutting back on production. Frank Price, the ex-studio head at Columbia and Universal, once said you couldn't produce and release more than fifteen quality movies a year. Disney is doing better since it cut back on production.

Lasseter has long been compared to Walt Disney. Did Disney ever have as long a winning streak? Perhaps the Disney studio in its prime under Walt?

Wall-E may replace Finding Nemo as my favorite Pixar film. Maybe it's because I love dystopian sci-fi, Charlie Chaplin, 2001: A Space Odyssey, and a fine musical romance. Wall-E reminds us of how much we humans have to lose. Plucky robot trash compactor Wall-E, at the start of the "silent" section of the film (sound magician Ben Burtt gives him a voice), has become the collector of human valuables after we have abandoned our garbage-pile planet.

One Variety colleague told me that she was trying to figure out why the movie moved her so much. She decided that the love between the robots was so pure, that it reminded her what love really was. When was the last time a movie did that? And the movie musical Hello Dolly! is the agent of their romance!

Here are links to past reports from Debruge:
from Comic-Con 2007, where Burtt made a presentation.

Pixar Exclusives.

[Photo Ben Burtt courtesy LAT]

Mike Jones took his flip phone to the LAFF Q & A with Guillermo del Toro while I went to an HBO doc party (Sheila Nevins! The Reeler! Sasha Alpert! Marina Zenovich!).

Here's Part One on Hellboy 2:

Here's Part Two on The Hobbit:

Documentary filmmaker, screenwriter and blogger A.J. Schnack strikes back at John Horn's recent death to docs piece in the LAT.

The indie crisis continues as U.K. distrib Tartan Films is shutting down. UPDATE: This distrib released many of the edgier pics out there, including one of the best films of recent years, The Death of Mr. Lazarescu (below), which few people ever saw.

Here's Variety:

U.K. distrib Tartan Films has finally shuttered. Sources told Variety that Tartan employees found the London office doors closed Thursday June 26 and were then informed later in the day by Tartan topper Hamish McAlpine the company was closed for business.

Speculation over the future of Tartan has been rife for several months. The distrib was believed to be in takeover talks with David Bergstein of the Capco Group, the firm that owns ThinkFilm, a stake in I.M. Global as well as the U.K.'s Capitol Film and has itself been plagued by rumors of financial troubles, for much of last year before negotiations broke down following disagreements over Tartan's financial worth.

Last October Tartan announced it had received a cash injection of £3 million ($6.2 million) in the form of a convertible loan from a private investor and also had restructured its Brit operation, with managing director Laura De Casto ankling. The company's theatrical and home entertainment departments, previously run out of separate London offices, were also merged into one entity based at Tartan's head office.

Tartan USA, the company's U.S. arm, announced at this year's Cannes that it was being foreclosed. Film print and advertising financing company Palisades Media Corp. has since bought the U.S. rights to its library.

UPDATE: McAlpine is a hard-driving, colorful figure who once inspired director Larry Clark to deck him one in London in 2002. Here's the LA Weekly. Presumably the Tartan Asia Extreme library was also sold to Palisades. Here's Cinematical.

ThinkFilm faces an uncertain future. While David Bergstein, the embattled financeer also behind Capco, Capitol Films in London and foreign sales company ThinkFilm International, has been expecting to close a bridge loan with Britain’s Aramid Entertainment Fund, ThinkFilm prexy Mark Urman is weathering a storm of negative PR from angry vendors and filmmakers who have not been paid and have gone public with lawsuits.

Filmmaker Alex Gibney (above), in particular, while he managed to get ThinkFilm to pay certain minimums and a $50,000 Oscar bonus for his film Taxi to the Dark Side, is now using the courts to try to win $1 million and distribution rights to his Oscar-winning torture doc. “Having won the Oscar we were perfectly positioned to make a national impact with a post-theatrical release,” Gibney wrote me in an e-mail. "But ThinkFilm utterly failed to capitalize on its success. We have since learned that Think didn’t have the financial resources to properly exploit the film.”

By all accounts, while library-builder Bergstein has long held a reputation for poorly managing “distressed” enterprises, ThinkFilm was “funky,” as one employee put it, ever since its formation seven years ago. When Bergstein bought it in October 2006 for $18 million plus $5 million in debt, the specialty distrib only got fudgier. When the Toronto office was shut down recently, four years of unpaid minimum guarantees on several straight-to-video films were revealed.

Bergstein has too many fingers in too many pies. He has plowed tens of millions of dollars that could have been used to pay ThinkFilm’s bills into such pictures as The Wendell Baker Story, which flopped, the Jennifer Lopez film Bordertown, which went straight to video, the genre film Bad Meat, Taylor Hackford’s Love Ranch, and David O. Russell’s Nailed, the film production from hell, which has been shut down four times for not meeting its payroll. “Millions of dollars go into the bank from The Devil Knows You’re Dead,” says one ThinkFilm exec. “Then it evaporates and we can’t pay our bills. All our money went to David O. Russell. The walls keep moving, the writing changing. We owe so many people so much money.”

Aramid or no Aramid, no matter how many times deal-junkie Bergstein has pulled money out of thin air, bankrupcy looms over the house of cards that Bergstein built.

What ThinkFilm has experienced—more money going out for minimum guarantees and prints and ads than comes back in—is typical of the indie sector, where you must wait years for ancillary revenues to trickle back. Frenchman Philippe Martinez came to Hollywood with an ambitious plan to release such films as David Ayer’s Harsh Times, but he crashed and burned. Businessman Sidney Kimmel has made some terrific movies, from Lars and the Real Girl to Synecdoche, New York, but he has reduced his production company by half, and made an unfortunate distribution deal with MGM, which is not equipped to handle delicate speciialty fare. Real estate mogul Bob Yari, who financed the sleeper hits Crash and The Illusionist but has been under financial duress since starting his own distribution company, is also expected to leave the film business. Whether he will pay all his bills is unclear.

That this state of affairs is allowed to exist in the indie world is astonishing. Vendors wait months if not years to get paid, knowing they will probably have to sue for their livelihood. One ThinkFilm vendor who hasn't been paid since last August is owed in the six figures. Gibney is outraged, trying to fight a broken system and win back rights to his film before it enters financial limbo.

On the other hand, it isn't every day that an indie company does everything right and wins an Oscar. ThinkFilm has done it several times. And it is highly unlikely that Taxi to the Dark Side would be able to earn much more than it did under the current dark moon hovering over the indie sector.

UPDATE: Gibney and other sources say there were plans to do a proper post-Oscar release, utilizing orgs like Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, which would have enhanced the movie's video value. The movie ended up with a drastically curtailed brief booking in one theater, and ThinkFilm lost the film's website.

See also stories in New York Times and Indiewire. UPDATE: ThinkFilm is dropping out of distributing Momma's Man.

When Warner Bros. shuttered Picturehouse and Warner Independent, it allowed Picturehouse's Bob Berney to release all three of the films he had ready to go: this summer both Mongol and Kit Kittredge: American Girl are showing surprising b.o. strength. And The Women is coming up in October.

On the other hand, unfortunately for WIP, the parent studio is taking over the August release of Alan Ball’s emigre drama Towelhead, a coming-of-age film with challenging sexual content that will need delicate handling, as well as Danny Boyle’s Slumdog Millionaire, which was scheduled for November.

Some WIP staffers have already left the lot; the balance are expected to exit on Aug. 15 (when WIP prexy Polly Cohen will likely open her own Warners prod shingle). Marketing head Laura Kim is working on the films for now (and fielding many inquiries about her next move). Warners will pick over the development slate, including such once-sizzling-hot projects as Tom Perrotta’s The Abstinence Teacher, with Little Miss Sunshine directors Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris attached, which will likely go into turnaround.

Here's the Towelhead trailer:

Todd McCarthy wrote his rave of Pixar's latest, Wall-E, late Wednesday night. Here's MCN critic Michael Wilmington. UPDATE: And Rotten Tomatoes rates the pic 97 % fresh. Wow.

Nobody does it better than Pixar. I went to see it Tuesday night but the traffic around Hollywood Boulevard was so impenetrable that I had to give up and turn around. ARRGH! I'll see it this weekend. Fantasy Moguls predicts a boffo opening.

Here's Todd's bullet-graph:

Pixar's ninth consecutive wonder of the animated world is a simple yet deeply imagined piece of speculative fiction. Despite the decade-plus since its inception, "WALL-E" is a film very much of its moment, although in a cheeky, uninsistent way; it has plenty to say, but does so in a light, insouciant manner that allows you to take the message or leave it on the table. Adroitly borrowing from many artistic sources and synthesizing innumerable influences, Pixar stalwart Andrew Stanton's first directorial outing since "Finding Nemo" walks a fine line between the rarefied and the immediately accessible as it explores new territory for animation, yet remains sufficiently crowd-pleasing to indicate celestial B.O. for this G-rated summer offering.

Paramount Pictures will not be putting on any panels or bringing any stars to Comic-Con this year. They may do some viral stuff. But their big "geek" titles G.I. Joe, J.J. Abrams' Star Trek, Michael Bay's Transformers 2 and M. Night Shyamalan's The Last Airbender won't be released until 2009. Last year Paramount kicked off Iron Man at the Con, which played big there. "The timing was off this year," said one Paramount spokesman.

UPDATE: As Slashfilm points out, Paramount was a major presence at the 2007 Comic-Con, with not only Iron Man but Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, Beowulf and Cloverfield.

Cinematical has more info on what the other studios are doing.

UPDATE: Paramount spokesman Mike Vollman just called me to say: "We have a vibrant and exciting schedule of activities planned for Comic-Con." The studio will be unveiling a number of marketing materials on these pics.

One interesting note on the 105 new members invited into the Motion Picture Academy this week: they include 72 men and 33 women.

As DreamWorks continues to seek financing for its planned reincarnation as a standalone independent company, two scenarios for the company’s future are emerging. Here's my Variety story.

Word is, DreamWorks is trying to raise $1 billion in equity and another $1 billion in debt so they can produce eight pictures a year. That would give Stacey Snider a bigger slate. And Dreamworks could allocate pictures to more than one studio, likely Paramount and Universal, so there'd be no nasty custody battle over the pics that were developed at Paramount.

What will happen, for example, to The 39 Clues, the new book DreamWorks just acquired, possibly for Spielberg to direct?

After Viacom bought DreamWorks SKG in early 2006 for $1.6 billion, Paramount and DreamWorks squabbled over credit for such hits as Dreamgirls, Norbit and Transformers. A sequel to the Michael Bay film is currently shooting, scheduled for release in summer 2009.

Raising more money would also mean that DreamWorks would not be solely involved with Indian company Reliance, whose topper, Anil Ambani (son of the industrialist on whom the Bollywood hit Guru was based), has expressed a desire for hands-on involvement with his Hollywood interests. That $500-600 million deal has not been closed. Some wonder if wily negotiator David Geffen has something else up his sleeve.

“Now India is owning DreamWorks?” asks one skeptical agency head, who questioned the idea that Spielberg would ever be willing to discuss his work with a Hollywood outsider.

Based on seeing Hancock the other night, I can tell you this. Todd McCarthy's early negative review will be one of many. The knives are out, and they are sharp. When this movie opens July 2, it will be eviscerated.

But because Will Smith is in what I call the Fluke Zone, the movie will open great over the 4th of July weekend (five-day estimates are from $80 to 100 million), and will do robust business. But it won't be one of the top-grossers of the summer, because it is unlikely to please everybody, or generate repeat biz. It could do better overseas.

It's a movie that tried to be smart and weird and interesting, with gifted filmmakers behind it: producers Michael Mann and Akiva Goldsman (who do cameos), edgy screenwriter Vince Gilligan (Breaking Bad), and director Peter Berg (Friday Night Lights, The Kingdom).

They created a fascinating damaged, alcoholic, homeless superhero, well-played by Smith, but their attempts to mix and match smart character-based drama (Charlize Theron and Jason Bateman also star) with superhero action adventure (VFX by Sony Pictures Imageworks) is a Frankenstein's Monster.

These are not cynical people. I don't know who to blame, so I'll start with the budget. If the movie cost, as I have been told, from $150 million (Sony's claim) to a rumored $180 million, then Sony and investor Relativity Media may have a tough time getting their money back. Studio-think dictate