In February of 2008, Universal’s chairman Marc Shmuger and co-chair David Linde took center stage with Hasbro’s CEO Brian Goldner to crow about a multimillion-dollar pact that would usher some of the world’s best-known games – like Battleship, Clue, and Candyland – onto the big screen. “This deal gives Universal access to some of the greatest brands in the world,” Shmuger and Linde explained of the fifty-fifty arrangement. “Hasbro’s portfolio of products has tremendous emotional resonance with children and adults. They offer an exciting opportunity for us to develop tentpole movies with built-in global brand awareness, which is a key component of our slate strategy.” You could almost hear Shmuger and Linde greedily rubbing their hands together like Hasbro’s top-hatted spokesman for the Monopoly brand, Rich Uncle Pennybags, and who could blame them?

The world in 2008 was a much different place. Brands were beginning to trump big-ticket actors at the box office. Warner Brothers director-driven, Nicholson-free Batman reboot was the year’s top earner. And Paramount already had their tentpole pitched with Hasbro’s Transformers, which pulled in over $70 million in its first weekend of release. That film would eventually gross more than $700 million worldwide and a sequel was already green lit and ready to go into production. Better still, with all apologies to Jon Voight as Defense Secretary John Keller, this franchise was actor-proof, getting Paramount in ground level by minting celebrities like Shia LaBeouf and Megan Fox, who’ve more or less remained faithful to the team. The stink of Paramount’s first Hasbro adaptation, 1985′s “Clue,” replete with three alternate endings, was now smelling sweet.

Worse still, Hasbro’s G.I. Joe was also cruelly ripped from the toy chest. The film had been languishing at Warner Brothers, who shelved it after the Iraqi War broke out, but Paramount rushed it through preproduction, cranking out a script before the 2007-2008 Writers Guild of America strike brought Hollywood to a standstill. The same month Shmuger and Linde announced their pact with Hasbro, the film “G.I Joe: The Rise of Cobra” started shooting. And forget that felt-headed 1960s action figure; G.I. Joe was now lingo for an elite military unit of special ops assembled to take on a notorious arms dealer. Again, actor-proof, with all apologies to Dennis Quaid as General Hawk.

By essentially shoring up Hasbro’s board games like Monopoly, Clue, and Candyland, the latex action figure Stretch Armstrong and whatever the hell a Ouija board is, and putting them into development, Shmuger and Linde looked like the smart money. So why is “Battleship” the first and only film realized under this six-year deal promising at least four tentpoles? The easy answer sounds churned from the hard-working computer that generates scripts for Michael Bay. Before the ink was even dry on their deal, the stock market took an unannounced u-turn and suddenly the $250-million-and-gaining budget for Battleship, which was, with all apologies to Liam Neeson as Admiral Shane, supposed to be actor-proof, started to look a tad excessive with the world economy in free fall. Shmuger and Linde didn’t have much time to mull it over. They got the boot the following year in a seismic regime change at Universal, ironically replaced by the studio’s marketing chief: brands, brands, brands.

Over at Paramount, 2009 also ushered in the fall of Transformer’s mainstay Megan Fox. With “Armageddon” and “Pearl Harbor” under his belt, director Michael Bay was the star pupil of Don Simpson’s high-concept academy, where film treatments could be scribbled on cocktail napkins. With the worldwide take on his Transformers trio close to $3 billion, Bay is the undisputed king of explosion porn. And then Fox compared him to Hitler. Like a self-fulfilling prophecy, she was eliminated and a game lookalike named Rosie Huntington-Whiteley had arrived. Despite Fox’s absence, “Transformers: Dark of the Moon” was a franchise first: breaking a billion dollars at the box office. With all apologies to Frances McDormand as no-nonsense Charlotte Mearing, the big-budget, high-concept army space movie was now also actress-proof.

Meanwhile, back at Universal, Hasbro properties were dropping faster than Colonel Mustard in the library with the candlestick. The deal had $5 million-dollar fines built in for each property the studio dallied on, and in the wake of Shmuger and Linde, the dallying was legend. What fresh-faced suit would touch a passed-around deal peddling Paramount’s sloppy seconds?

Still, Alec Baldwin wasn’t playing Scrabble on that plane. Hasbro whiffed on crucial in-roads into online gaming. And with no Hasbro co-branded films last year, the company cut 170 employees and still slipped into the red. North American sales dropped sixteen percent this quarter. When it broke the bad news, Hasbro tried to soften the blow by cluelessly announcing the reboot of their 1999 talking Pet Rock called Furby. Last summer, Hasbro quietly accepted a whopping multimillion-dollar deal that allowed Universal out of the contract two years early and three films short.

Shortly thereafter, the studio unloaded both the Clue redux and a McG-helmed Ouija. Even with Bay attached as producer, Paramount quickly but firmly slid their planchette over the word no. This year, Stretch Armstrong departed for Relativity Media, but star Taylor Lautner bailed, citing the only thing more naff than actually portraying Stretch Armstrong: a role in Gus Van Sant’s latest project.

The only happy ending seems to be Candyland, which last February was the final Hasbro piece purged from Universal’s slate only to end up at Sony Pictures as an Adam Sandler vehicle. So much for the “built-in global brand awareness” that would save some money on actors. If Hasbro’s homeless contain a message, it’s that blowing up shit is expensive, but special effects don’t make films actor-proof. That, and phrases like “Rihanna, in her first non-musical role” are the way the world ends. Sandler is the object lesson here. He may not be an actor, but he is expensive, pulling $50 million in a bad year, i.e., one in which he co-stars with Jennifer Aniston. Do the math: Five Adam Sandlers will sink your Battleship.

This collection of extremely silly photos of extremely serious writers has a little of everything. Susan Sontag in a bear suit? Check! Ernest Hemingway kicking a beer can? Check! Suddenly I’m overwhelmed by the urge to follow Joan Didion with a camera in case she dances in a fountain or something.

Speaking of Hemingway, one of my favorite websites — Letters of Note — has posted a letter that the Old Man and the Sea author wrote to his parents when he was nineteen years old, in which he describes becoming seriously wounded while at war. “There is nothing for you to worry about, because it has been fairly conclusively proved that I can’t be bumped off,” he tells them. He managed to survive another (very intense) forty years, so I guess he had a point there.

Morgan Freeman seems like one of those actors who’s been middle-aged forever, so it’s a delight to see a funky fresh Freeman teaching literacy in this 1971 clip from the kids show “The Electric Company.” Funny, isn’t it? Decades later, he’d inspire those same kids (now grownups) to read yet again when he starred in the Stephen King adaptation, “The Shawshank Redemption.”

This list of the top ten best time-travel movies is so elite that “Twelve Monkeys” only ranks No. 5, and “Donnie Darko” didn’t make the list at all. I’m beginning to doubt io9′s commitment to Sparkle Motion.

Amy Adams is a busy girl. Coming off the success of last year’s “The Muppets,” Adams has lined up quite a schedule for herself over the next two years.

This fall, Adams will star alongside Clint Eastwood in “Trouble with the Curve.” Additionally, in the Walter Sellers direction of “On the Road,” she’ll be part of a strong ensemble cast that includes Kristen Stewart, Viggo Mortensen, and Kirsten Dunst. In Paul Thomas Anderson’s long-awaited follow up to “There Will Be Blood,” Adams will star alongside Philip Seymour Hoffman and Joaquin Phoenix in “The Master.” She’ll also play Lois Lane in Zach Snyder’s “Man of Steel.” Adams has also been rumored for the next Spike Jonze project, and is set to star in and produce the film adaptation of Steve Martin’s novel, Object of Beauty.

As if all this weren’t enough, the latest news surrounding Adams is that she’s in talks to take the lead role in the film adaptation of Gillian Flynn’s bestselling novel, Dark Places. The film will be written and directed by Gilles Paquet-Brenner, who is coming off of his own success with the 2010 release “Sarah’s Key.”

If the title of the book is any indication, this is sure to be one of the darkest roles for Adams to date. Her character, Libby Day, was only seven years old when she witnessed the murder of her mother and two sisters. She survived only to testify against her older brother who was convicted and sent to jail for the murder. Twenty-five years later, Libby is forced to relive her tragic youth when a secret society of crime solvers hunts her down and questions her on details about the case.
Gillian Flynn’s third novel, Gone Girl, is due out next month. Gone Girl is another dark tale from the mind of Flynn, focusing on a deceit-filled marriage that takes a terrible turn. Although no news regarding a film has been released to date, perhaps Adams will find a home among Flynn’s troubled – and intriguing – leading ladies.

Like a vengeful god, James Franco spent much of 2011 deluging us with things he created or news of things he planned to create. And once the inevitable backlash set in the public grew weary and wary of the rapid-fire announcements about the latest awards show he was hosting, blockbuster he was headlining, auteur-driven prestige picture he was promoting, meta short film he’d shot, art installation he’d created, book he was planning to write or adapt into a film he planned to direct. So in an act of self-preservation and mercy to our readers, we instituted an unofficial James Franco blackout period: No more James Franco-driven posts until further notice.

Notice: A sufficient period of time has elapsed to stop the spread of widespread Franco burnout. This change in policy was set in motion by news of a pair of undeniably intriguing, challenging, and potentially groundbreaking feature films based on the work of two lions of contemporary narrative poetry — Stephen Dobyns and C. K. Williams — whose best work sits on our special shelf designated for books that most remind us of who we are, what we love, why we’re alive. Williams’ Flesh and Blood and Dobyns’ Body Traffic occupy that vaunted space in my library alongside the classics and sentimental favorites that also made the cut.

Franco has selected different collections — Williams’ Tar and Dobyns’ Black Dog, Red Dog – for his two feature adaptations and he’s already recruited a motley crew of recognizable actresses for each film. “Tar” will star Jessica Chastain and Mila Kunis while the likes of Whoopi Goldgerg, Chloe Sevigny, and Olivia Wilde have signed up for roles in “Black Dog, Red Dog.” However it’s nearly impossible to determine what shape these projects will take narratively or stylistically. Both Dobyns’ and Williams’ work might be described as spare, raw, emotionally-incisive portraiture of the disappointments and fleeting moments of unexpected delight animating our daily lives. Williams writes in long highly structured stanzas always ending with an explosively beautiful or painful last line. Dobyns’ work offers astringent, honest, and id-fueled insights into the comedy of our failures and tragedies of our successes.

It doesn’t really matter where either of these films lands on the success spectrum. This pair of projects is such an ambitious and audacious undertaking, the results will offer an interesting and informative point of reference for anyone interested in engaging with storytelling that grapples with life’s Big Questions. What’s particularly exciting here is that if either one of these flicks receives even the most modest acclaim, it could open the door to more poetry in motion pictures. For our money, this would be a very positive development indeed.

The relatively slim back catalogue of poetry-based feature films runs the gamut from “O Brother Where Art Thou” (Homer) to “Howl” (Allen Ginsberg) to “The Raven” (Poe). And while there has been no shortage of films about poets — “Sylvia,” “An Angel at My Table,” “Total Eclipse” among them — only the most determined and intrepid filmmakers have attempted to translate verse into a screenplay’s three-act structure.

If Franco achieves the breakthrough we’re hoping for in this arena, we’ve already worked up a wish list of poets whose work we’d most like to see on the big screen. Our most urgent request is a dark journey into the heart and soul of Anne Sexton‘s oeuvre. We’d also be thrilled to see what some enterprising filmmaker might do with the poems of Pablo Neruda, Robert Pinsky, Philip Levine, and Elizabeth Bishop. While we’re taking orders, why don’t you submit a few of the poets, living or not, whose work you feel is most camera ready.

Everyone relax: William Landay’s bestselling legal thriller Defending Jacob is in good hands — it appears as though the book will be adapted to the screen by Steve Kloves, the fellow who adapted seven of the eight “Harry Potter” movies. (Anyone know what kept him from working on “Order of the Phoenix“? Wikipedia merely cites “other commitments.”)

Stop the presses — George Lucas has finally done something that his own fans approve of! It seems that the director’s neighbors blocked him from building a film studio on his lush property in Marin County, so he’s decided instead to devote the land to low-income housing, offering this reasoning: “If everyone feels that housing is less impactful on the land, then we are hoping that people who need it the most will benefit.” That will, as the saying goes, hit the wealthy Marin County residents where they live.

Ashton Kutcher, saddled with the difficult character work of growing out his hair and beard in the Steve Jobs biopic, has finally been spotted in full regalia. The late Apple co-founder and CEO passed away last fall. According to HuffPo, the casting makes sense because Kutcher is invested in numerous tech start-ups, such as Foursquare. (Fortunately for us, he looks good in a turtleneck.)

Judd Apatow’s Pee-wee Herman film project is alive and kicking, says star Paul Reubens, and could start filming “any minute.” The unlikely pair have been collaborating on the next Pee-wee installment for at least two years, and it’s the first we’ve seen of Pee-wee since his Broadway show was revived in 2011. Wait a second, it looks like “revived” is the secret word: AAHHHHH!

Sex is in the air. It’s springtime, after all, and even Big Media has been feeling frisky, venturing out into some pretty risky behavior, experimenting with (sotto voce) this fringe notion of desire that originates in, gasp, women. This week, before the summer’s bottleneck of superhero origin stories hits theaters, will see the debut of an original story of a different stripe with Tanya Wexler’s “Hysteria,” starring Hugh Dancy and Maggie Gyllenhaal chronicling the advent of the vibrator. Then there’s the giddy debate surrounding the frank sex scenes in HBO’s “Girls.” Is series creator Lena Dunham a masochist or a cynic for revealing her own sexual degradation week after week? Or is she simply bold enough to offer the first lights-on glimpse at the shabby state of human intimacy in the age of YouPorn?

The answer (clearly the latter) is kind of beside the point. Yes, much has been made recently of Hollywood’s female problem. Nicole Sperling and John Horn’s groundbreaking investigative piece in the LA Times landed like a, um, bombshell, with its statistical proof that the Academy’s white male demographics rival that of a 1950s gentleman’s club. And female directors didn’t fare much better in this year’s Cannes lineup. But we’d argue that there’s been a groundswell of boundary-pushing projects by, for, and about women taking agency over their own happiness and, dare we say it, pleasure.

Just this weekend, writer-director Lisa Cholodenko confirmed that she’ll be spearheading an adaptation of Cheryl Strayed‘s stunning wilderness self-discovery memoir, Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail. This news also comes with a slight caveat: Reese Witherspoon is attached to play the emotionally unstrung twentysomething, who, reeling from a recent divorce following the loss of her mother, presses the reset button on her life and sets out on an eleven-hundred-mile hike that would take her from the Mojave Desert to Washington State over the course of four years. Beyond being an exquisite piece of (wo)man vs. wild wilderness journalism, which combines the built-in suspense of a survival story with the journey from hubris to humbled in the face of nature’s power trajectory of Jon Krakauer‘s best work, Strayed (who studied fiction writing at Syracuse with George Saunders and Mary Gaitskill) infuses Wild with a novelistic wit and introspection while never allowing herself to dip into the solipsistic digressions Elizabeth Gilbert indulged a little too often in Eat, Pray, Love.

Wild, however, isn’t about a woman owning her relationship with sex per se. It plays with some of the same themes of owning agency and finding power and a perverse thrill in a stripped-down state of vulnerability in a literary milieu — wilderness survival — often dominated by men (think: “127 Hours” or “Into the Wild”). This is definitely new terrain for Cholodenko, whose previous work has been firmly rooted in such heady urban milieu as the New York art world (“High Art“), LA’s Rock n’ Roll libertines (“Laurel Canyon”), and upwardly mobile lesbians (“The Kids Are All Right”). But Cholodenko’s unique gift for mining startling emotional truths out of even the most extreme situations — remember the scene in “The Kids Are All Right” when Annette Bening’s character gradually melts in on herself as she learns Julianne Moore has cuckholded her with Mark Ruffalo? — could guide this adaptation beyond the tropes of its somewhat formula-bound genre into uncharted emotional terrain.

As it happens, Julianne Moore is at the center of this weekend’s other sign that women filmmakers are increasingly putting their own stamp on stories of female sexual angst and awakening. In this case, Moore has signed on to Kimberly Peirce‘s remake of Stephen King‘s Carrie in the role of the title character’s fanatically religious mother who wages a crusade-like battle against her telekinetically endowed daughter’s budding sexuality. The original film, directed by the 1970s pioneer of sexual thrillers, Brian De Palma, offered a groundbreaking exploration of the angst (religious or otherwise) surrounding a young woman’s sexual coming of age. This is an inspired choice for Peirce, who made her directorial debut with “Boys Don’t Cry,” a searingly visceral take on the panic surrounding a teenage girl’s sexual identity (as a guy). Among the many reasons this project fascinates us is the rare  rare opportunity it affords to compare and contrast how our views of young women and sex have evolved since the ’70s, and the differences between a male and female director’s point of view on the bloody battle to survive high school, hormones, and one hellishly controlling mother.

As much as we’ve appreciated bold works like Lars Von Trier’s “Antichrist,” which have asked tough questions about the lingering effects of the Judeo-Christian discomfort with women and sexuality, we’re particularly excited to finally get the “she said” version of the story. What are your thoughts on the sources — political, cultural, social — of this sudden surge of female sexual sovereignty on film and TV? What are some of films and books — past, present and future — you feel have best captured the terror and exhilaration of coming to terms with our inner sexy beasts?

I’ve been hearing about 3-D printing for a while, but I’d never considered the practical advantage it would offer to filmmaking. The creators of the new stop-motion animation movie “ParaNorman” (by the crew who adapted Neil Gaiman’s Coraline) have used 3-D printing to make all the tiny puppet heads required to give the characters a full range of facial expressions; in the olden days of “The Nightmare before Christmas,” all the Jack Skellington heads had to be made by hand, which meant that the character wound up being far more limited in the range of emotions he could express.

Last week I thought I’d found the definitive new Divine Comedy illustrations, but I spoke too soon. Dante’s Inferno has been given a LEGO makeover by a sculptor named Mihai Mihu. Each circle of Hell has been rendered lovingly in little plastic blocks. It would almost be worth going there just to admire the architecture.

You know that thing where key characters are conspicuously absent from a sequel, and their absence is marked with little or no explanation? The AVClub has taken note, and listed twenty-two of the most intelligence-insulting examples. Included are “Jaws” and “American Psycho,” which are notable for also having no literary precedent for their cinematic sequels.

Apparently if you want a guaranteed big score in the world of publishing, you’ve got at least two solid options in front of you: Henry VIII and Adolf Hitler. I imagine that vampires are a not-too-distant third; anyone bold enough to combine all three in one book will wind up re-invigorating the entire industry!

It’s no mystery that mothers often have the juiciest part in any memoir. It stands to reason that the person who played arguably the most pivotal role in our conception and birth should be featured prominently in any honest account of a person’s life. Think of it as cosmic payback for bearing the brunt of the blame for the deepest emotional damage accrued during childhood and beyond. Mothers also seem to take the hit for not better preparing their spawn for the collision with the human condition that often hits around middle age. We’re talking here about the disappointment that comes with the realization that we’re born into an imperfect world where the promise of unconditional love dooms us to a lifetime of relationships with people who fail to buffer us from the existential truth of our essential aloneness.

Who is to blame for the despair and indignation that goes along with these existential reality checks? The messenger, that’s who. And the first person to deliver the message (implicitly or explicitly) is more often than not one’s mother. Talk about a setup for failure and disappointment. It’s no wonder the most memorable mothers on screen and in print are rarely characters to whom you’d ever entrust your kids.

To commemorate Mother’s Day — and what may be our society’s most high-pressure job with the lowest odds for success — we’ve assembled the following collection of a few the most indelible memoir-based movie moms, each more flawed than the next. And in the spirit of the big family dinner table that is the virtual world we all now inhabit, we hope you’ll weigh in with a few of your most and least favorite cinematic mother figures.

“Running with Scissors” (2006)
Few behaviors place children at a higher risk of a therapy-filled future than a mother figure with a poetic temperament and a pretentious conviction that the rest of the world is slightly dumber and less deserving of attention and praise. And though Augusten Burroughs‘ mom scores off the charts in both categories, he seems to regard his manic-depressive mother (played with great panache in Ryan Murphy’s big-screen adaptation by Annette Bening) with wry affection, as if his teenage self knows that all her crazy antics will add up to good material for his yet-to-be-written memoir. Among the many questionable judgment calls set in motion by Burroughs mere is her decision to send her fourteen-year-old to live with her eccentric therapist, whose home office comes complete with a “masturbatorium.”

“Anywhere But Here“ (1999)
Before the man-child became a pop cultural trope, there was its precursor: the mom-child. This subset of the species is often staggeringly ill-equipped for parenthood partially due to a generational quirk that arrested their development just as the sexual revolution and media age were getting under way. This phenomenon goes a long way toward explaining the epidemic of bad 1970s parenting (e.g., inappropriate exposure to movies, pornography, and other forms of media; acrimonious divorce). This confluence of events also sparked an epidemic of beautiful narcissistic women who became convinced that they were destined to be discovered by Hollywood and inducted into the cult of fame.

In this adaptation of Mona Simpson’s eponymous reflection on her peripatetic childhood, a young Natalie Portman plays the author as a soulful participant observer riding shotgun as her self-absorbed mother (Susan Sarandon in tragic past-her-prime bombshell mode) chased her dream in the half-promised land of the slums of Beverly Hills. This film follows the tandem coming-of-age stories for both mother and daughter and makes a compelling case for the ways in which a parent’s half-baked ambitions and unrealized dreams can motivate a child to achieve great things, if only to avoid a similar fate.

“This Boy’s Life” (1993)
In 1989, Tobias Wolff wrote the ne plus ultra memoir of surviving a childhood miserables. Wolff’s unsentimental telling of his hard-scrabble Oregon boyhood burrows deeply into a dark and dusty place in a reader’s emotional storage bin, where personal memories are stored with a few characters and scenes picked up in only the most resonant books and movies, This Boy’s Life chief among them. The indignities Wolff suffered growing up with a first-generation single mom, an early-adopter 1950s version of the can-do archetype (played with well-meaning resignation by Ellen Barkin) and a bullying stepfather (Robert De Niro) may have been particular to young Wolff’s less-than-ideal upbringing. But, both on the page and on the screen, Wolff’s story unfolds with such ruthless grit and truth-telling self-awareness, it’s hard not to find something familiar in each of the flawed characters populating this story of a mother and son’s imperfect, but genuinely loving, union.

“The Fighter” (2010)
David O. Russell films merit their own chapter in the annals of movies featuring epically unfit mothers. His 1994 directorial debut, “Spanking the Monkey,” featured a sexually frustrated college student who has a deeply unsettling fling with his mom while home for summer break. But it’s hard to imagine a more maddeningly destructive mother than the one at the heart of “The Fighter,” based on the life (yet to be committed to memoir) of blue-collar pugilist, Micky Ward, who spent as much time battling dysfunctional family members as he did beating back beefy boxers in the ring. His mother, a fierce creature of interest in spandex, peroxide, and shiny red daggers for nails, wields her maternal power like a vengeful goddess righteously determined to ruin her sons’ lives by expecting too much of one and not enough of the other. Of course, it’s hard for any mother to admit that she’s severely misjudged her own children. But Micky Ward’s mom is a piece of work of epic proportions, so shocking in her stage-mom selfishness, her character on screen was so singularly corrosive that Melissa Leo netted her second Oscar for playing the role.

“Being Flynn” (2012)
The homeless father figure at the heart of Another Bullshit Night in Suck City is a dramatic and charismatic character who receives more than his fair share of attention and air-time throughout Nick Flynn’s picaresque reflection on his alcohol-soaked coming of age, which spans his early childhood through early middle-age. But the feminine half of Flynn’s parental equation seems to haunt the narrative, remaining just powerful and palpable in her absence as his father is in his ubiquitous iniquity. Flynn and his brother drew a disastrously bad hand in the parenting department – deadbeat is too generous a term to describe his father; his mother tried to provide for her sons working in diners until she couldn’t and finally committed suicide. But there is something tragic-heroic about the sense of we’re-better-than-this dignity his mother brought to her daily struggle to survive. In director Paul Weitz’ moody rendering of Flynn’s book, Julianne Moore brings a fragility and sense of untapped potential to the role that leaves you wondering what that woman (and so many others like her) might have accomplished if fate had fallen in her favor.

Good news for people who love bad movies (and bad news for everyone else): The team who brought you “Date Movie” and “Meet the Spartans” has decided to lampoon the biggest show in town with “The Starving Games.” Apparently the movie will also mock recent broad targets such as “Sherlock Holmes” and “Harry Potter,” to minimal comic effect. The movie will make millions of dollars based on name-recognition alone, granting the filmmakers the financial freedom to keep making insipid parodies until they die. There goes the twenty-first century.

Did you know that the famously grim Harry Clarke illustrations to Edgar Allan Poe‘s Tales of Mystery and Imagination made such a huge splash when they were first published that copies of the book sold for five guineas? (That’s about $300 by today’s standards.) You can learn more about the history of these incredible illustrations right here.

Tor wants to know who you’d cast in a fantasy “Avengers”-type league of heroes. They’ve assembled a spectrum of suggestions from film and literature, from Fezzik in “The Princess Bride” (played by Andre the Giant) to Falkor the luck dragon from “The Neverending Story.” Robert Jordan and George R. R. Martin heroes abound. C’mon, admit it — if this ever made it to the screen, you’d watch.

Instead of the torment that was “Alien vs. Predator,” we were this close to having an “Alien 5″ directed by James Cameron, starring Sigourney Weaver and maybe even Arnold Schwarzenegger. Unfortunately FOX decided to move ahead with its monster mash-up instead, and Cameron moved on to other things. A painful lesson to learn, but if it ultimately brought us to “Prometheus” then perhaps it was worth it.

Away We Go is a 2009 original screenplay from Dave Eggers and Vendela Vida. Verona and Burt are expecting a baby and set out across the U.S. to find the perfect place to raise their child. On their way, they discover their very own sense of “home” via odd encounters with strangers and relatives.

The 2009 film was directed by Academy Award winner Sam Mendes (“American Beauty”, ” Revolutionary Road”). Comedic auteurs John Krasinski and Maya Rudolph brought their unique humor to the screenplay, and, coupled with Mendes’ direction and the accompanying acting talents of Allison Janney, Maggie Gyllenhaal and Jeff Daniels, the resulting product is quite simply, quite lovely. The story touches the heart — and the funny bone. And the script is worth a read to catch every last bit of the nuanced dialogue.