With regard to the sequels to and remakes of your favorite properties from 1982-1993:

• Dan Aykroyd continues to promise Ghostbusters 3, revealing that the sequel plot centers on troubling research by Columbia University particle physicists.
• Director Gil Kenan (City of Ember) has begun to cast his remake of Poltergeist for a September shoot in Toronto.  Plot details have surfaced.
• Sam Neill says it is unlikely he will be a part of Jurassic Park 4, in part because he believes it is a reboot.

More on each project after the jump.

Damon Lindelof is on the interview circuit, mostly explaining what he did with Star Trek Into Darkness.  Lost ended in 2006, and Lindelof is waiting to hear if HBO will pick up his Rapture series The Leftovers, which would throw him back into the grind of producing a television show.  In the transition years, Lindelof has tackled a variety of sci-fi tentpoles: Star Trek, Cowboys & Aliens, Prometheus.  The next is Tomorrowland, an intriguing project at Disney that Brad Bird (Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol) will direct.  George Clooney, Hugh Laurie, and Raffey Cassidy are on board to star.

Rumored plot details leaked in March.  Lindelof didn’t elaborate much on what was out there other than to say some of the public information is “completely and totally erroneous.”  But he did discuss the inspiration behind the project, how he wants to give Tomorrowland a story (the Pirates of the Caribbean treatment), and his fascination with Disney history.  Read what he had to say after the jump.

A couple of updates out of the camp of FX pilots.  Unfortunately, it looks like Oscar-winning director Ang Lee will be tapping out of production on the drama pilot Tyrant, citing exhaustion from filming and promoting Life of Pi.  The story centers on an unassuming American family drawn into the workings of a turbulent Middle East nation; Tyrant’s pilot may be shooting in Morocco.  The search for a replacement is currently underway.

For more on what Lee had to say about his departure from the project and for casting information on Guillermo del Toro’s FX pilot, The Strain, hit the jump.

Hey, remember when Patton Oswalt did a guest spot on NBC’s Parks and Recreation and did an eight-minute filibuster on his pitch for Star Wars: Episode VII?  Well, it took the internets about a month to do it, but that dream is now a reality.  Animated by Isaac Moores, the eight-minute video features your favorite Star Wars characters reimagined for a contemporary audience and quite a few crossovers from the Marvel realm (now that both are owned by Disney).  If you haven’t heard Oswalt’s original speech, I won’t ruin the surprises for you here.  Hit the jump to check the short out instead.

Megan Fox is probably going to shoot down your tried-and-true pick-up lines on the best of days, even if you’re not wearing a geometrically-patterned turtle shell with oven mitts on your hands and deedlybops on your head.  So imagine how difficult it must be for Raphael (Alan Ritchson) to convince April O’Neil (Megan Fox) to give him back his signature sais.  This new batch of set images from Jonathan Liebesman’s Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles shows just that scene unfolding.  I’m assuming the red bandana around Ritchson’s arm is to distinguish him as Raph and that he’s not robbing O’Neil as some sort of gang initiation rewrite.

Hit the jump to view the new images.  The film also stars Danny Woodburn, Pete Ploszek, Jeremy Howard, and Noel Fisher.  Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles opens on June 6, 2014.

Check out the latest casting news below:

• Viggo Mortensen (The Lord of the Rings trilogy) will star in his first French-language role in writer-director David Oelhoffen’s Loin des hommes (Far From Men). 
• Peter Dinklage (Game of Thrones) will star in Hop Frog, a revenge thriller based on the Edgar Allan Poe story that will be directed by Mark Palansky (Penelope).
• Carice van Houten (Game of Thrones) has landed the lead of Greta Garbo in a biopic for the Swedish screen legend.
• Dylan O’Brien (Teen Wolf) is reportedly in talks to lead Glimmer, a sci-fi thriller about a group of teens discovering a portal through time and directed by Ringan Ledwidge (Gone).

Hit the jump for more on each casting announcement.

Sony Pictures has released a batch of new images from writers/directors Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg’s apocalypse comedy This Is the End.  The film finds Rogen, James Franco, Jonah Hill, Jay Baruchel, Danny McBride, and Craig Robinson all playing versions of themselves as they hole up in Franco’s house when a world-ending event occurs.  The trailers, featurettes, and recent clip with Emma Watson all make the comedy look like a lot of fun, and I’m eager to see how Rogen and Goldberg fare in their directorial debut.

Hit the jump to check out the high-resolution images.  The film also stars Jason Segel, Michael Cera, David Krumholtz, Paul Rudd, Martin Starr, Mindy Kaling, Kevin Hart, Aziz Ansari, and Rihanna.  This Is the End opens on June 14, 2013.

Today, we’ve already seen set photos from The Amazing Spider-Man 2 and X-Men: Days of Future Past, and now we’ve got some more from Captain America: The Winter Soldier.  The upcoming sequel sees Captain America (Chris Evans) teaming up with Black Widow (Scarlett Johansson) to track down the nefarious Winter Soldier (Sebastian Stan).  Filming is underway in Cleveland, which is standing in for Washington, D.C. and the scene has S.W.A.T. and police involved in a shootout of some kind.  The photos also show us Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson) wandering around, but these images don’t hint at how the character is involved in the scene.

Hit the jump to check out the photos as well as video from the set.  The film also stars Anthony Mackie, Cobie Smulders, Georges St-Pierre, Frank Grillo, Hayley Atwell, Toby Jones, Emily VanCamp, Maximiliano Hernández, and Robert Redford.  Captain America: The Winter Soldier opens April 2, 2014.

Production is underway on The Hobbit…again.  Director Peter Jackson announced today that filming has resumed on the trilogy in New Zealand, as there’s still a bit of footage yet to be captured in order to fill the J.R.R. Tolkein adaptation out to three films.  While originally envisioned as a two-film adaptation, Jackson and fellow screenwriters/producers Philipa Boyens and Fran Walsh convinced Warner Bros. to greenlight a third film last summer, after they had already wrapped what we presumed to be the bulk of principal photography.  Hit the jump for more on the additional filming, including what material it covers.

The Wolverine trailers have been teased, double-teased, released internationally, released domestically, released just for Japan, released just for CinemaCon and even Sweded.  With all of that footage already shown, you might be surprised to discover that another new trailer is due out tomorrow.  Set to release at 6AM PST, the new trailer will also play in theaters in front of Fast & Furious 6 this week.  As a bonus to this announcement, we also have two new character posters to share with you.

James Mangold’s The Wolverine stars Hugh Jackman, Will Yun Lee, Hiroyuki Sanada, Brian Tee, Rila Fukushima, Tao Okamoto and Svetlana Khodchenkova and opens on July 26th.  Hit the jump to check out the new posters.

Warner Bros. loves their character posters, and it was only a matter of time before they started rolling them out for Man of Steel.  They’ve kicked them off with Superman’s daddy, Jor-El (Russell Crowe).  It’s a forceful poster (I’m not sure why a scientist like Jor-El needs a giant gun), and I’m wondering how it will compare to a poster for Lois Lane (Amy Adams) or Ma and Pa Kent (Diane Lane and Kevin Costner) assuming they get ones.  Meanwhile, I’ll keep my fingers crossed for Warner Bros. going overboard and making character posters for Richard Schiff and Christopher Meloni.

Hit the jump to check out the poster along with a new featurette.  The film also stars Henry Cavill, Michael Shannon, and Laurence Fishburne.  Man of Steel opens in 3D on June 14th.

[Update: WB has now released character posters for Cavill as Superman and Shannon as Zod.]

Here’s today’s latest casting news:

• Liam Hemsworth (The Hunger Games) will star in the action picture Aurora Rising, which follows a test pilot storyline based on a screenplay by Christian Gudegast (A Man Apart).
• Anthony Hopkins (The Silence of the Lambs) has joined the mobster biopic Gotti for director Joe Johnston (Captain America: The First Avenger).
• Kate Hudson (Almost Famous) joins Zach Braff’s Wish I Was Here, funded partially from crowd-sourced money via Kickstarter.

Hit the jump for more on each casting announcement.

Relativity Media’s long-in-the-works action thriller Hunter Killer may soon have a new director.  Variety reports that McG has entered negotiations to take over the director’s chair on the project from Antoine Fuqua, who himself replaced Phillip Noyce on the film.  The pic is based on the novel Firing Point by Don Keith and George Wallace and “follows an untested submarine captain who must work with a Navy SEAL team to rescue Russia’s president, who’s taken prisoner during a military coup. The two sides team to stop a rogue Russian general from igniting World War III.”  Gerard Butler was initially slated to star, but he and Fuqua went and made Olympus Has Fallen instead so McG will be looking for a new lead.  The script was written by Jamie Moss, John Kolvenbach, and Arne Schmidt.

McG most recently helmed the thriller Three Days to Kill starring Kevin Costner, also for Relativity.  Clearly the studio is happy with the results and wants to continue its relationship with the Charlie’s Angels and Terminator Salvation director.

Following the back-to-back productions of The Social Network and The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, director David Fincher has been taking his time in settling on his next project.  He’s been developing a remake of 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea at Disney for years, and the project finally started to gain traction earlier this year with Fincher courting Brad Pitt as his star.  However, Pitt ultimately passed on the role in favor of David Ayer’s WWII film Fury, leaving Fincher’s 20,000 Leagues without a star or a greenlight.

Despite these two crucial facts, we learned last month that Australia had agreed to an enormous tax incentive ($22.5 million) for Fincher to shoot 20,000 Leagues down under, making the remake that much more attractive for Disney.  Now word comes that since the film still doesn’t have a lead actor, potential production has been pushed to 2014.  Hit the jump for more.

Pacific Rim feels so far away, and that’s because it kind of is.  We’re a little under two months until the movie’s release, and there are plenty of blockbusters before Guillermo Del Toro‘s monsters-vs-robots picture hits the big screen.  But Warner Bros. is already making sure that TV audiences are aware of the flick, and the first TV spot has been released.  There’s some new footage in here, but every thing I’ve seen just leaves me with the same thought: I need to see this on a movie screen.

Hit the jump to check out the TV spot.  The film stars Charlie Hunnam, Idris Elba, Rinko Kikuchi, Charlie Day, and Ron Perlman.  Pacific Rim opens in 3D on July 12th.