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(Hollywood Reporter) As “Battleship” steams towards a start date this month, the pricey adaptation of the Hasbro board game is entering deep, treacherous waters.

With a budget of $200 million (£128.3 million) or more and no major movie stars on board, the Universal project is raising eyebrows among industry insiders who question whether the expensive gamble will pay off when the film comes out in 2012.

“It’s a big bet like many, many big bets from many studios,” Universal chairman Adam Fogelson told The Hollywood Reporter. “We will be nowhere near the high point and nowhere near the low point of what people are spending.”

(Source: TheWrap.com) The guy who wrote “Puff the Magic Dragon” says that 2D cinema is dead.

Ordinarily, the opinion of a one-hit songwriter might not matter much in the world of entertainment technology – but in this case, the songwriter who penned the lyrics to Peter, Paul and Mary’s classic at the age of 19 also happens to be the so-called father of 3D cinema, and the closest thing to a rock star that the field has to offer.

(Source: AP) Federal regulators on Monday allowed a new online exchange to proceed to trade future box-office receipts for movies.

A divided Commodity Futures Trading Commission approved the proposed futures contracts for the new Trend Exchange. That means the movie futures trading can proceed; it is expected to begin sometime in the third quarter.

Major Hollywood studios strongly oppose the idea. They say rival studios could sabotage films by betting against them.

In giving its approval, the CFTC said it found that box-office receipts fit the law’s definition of a commodity, that the Trend Exchange contracts aren’t “readily susceptible” to manipulation, and they provide a way of managing risk.

(Source: Variety) Last week’s FMX visual effects and animation conference in Stuttgart, Germany, featured presentations on “Alice in Wonderland” and the vfx of “Avatar,” as well as a presentation by Victoria Alonso on “Producing the Marvel Experience.”

While students and pros packed into the main Koenig-Karl Hall to learn about those hits, a smaller group nearby was taking in a program with more far-reaching implications: the “5D/Europe” conference.

In the FMX program, 5D is defined as “a global community of creative thinkers committed to exploring the vital role of design in the new collaborative and multi-disciplinary process of digital creation in all narrative media.”

(Soucre: darkhorizons.com)  Deadline  reports that producers Michael Shamberg and Stacey Sher (“Pulp Fiction,” “Erin Brockovich”) have optioned the film rights to Alan Goldsher’s music history fantasy parody novel “Paul is Undead”.

The story portrays John Lennon as a zombie guitarist from Liverpool who kills and reanimates his three bandmembers. The quartet create hits and bloody mayhem across the world as they snack on fans’ brains.

The book also features Mick Jagger as the UK’s best zombie hunter, and Yoko Ono as an eighth level ninja. There’s even a scene where Jesus agrees with a zombie John Lennon that the Beatles are bigger than him.

(Source: latinoreview.com)  The Federal Communications Commission (FCC), saying it was “in the public interest” today approved a request by the Motion Picture Association of America, Inc. (MPAA) to permit recent movies to be sent directly to American households over secure high definition transmission lines from their cable or satellite providers prior to their release on DVD or Blu-ray.

(Source: ny1.com) The animated movie “Metropia,” which screens this week at the Tribeca Film Festival, has an eerie combination of photography and imagination. NY1’s Technology reporter Adam Balkin filed the following report.

“Metropia,” screening this week at the Tribeca Film Festival, is a new kind of animated film that could fool actors into believing that they’re watching live actors. The creators of the film take photographs, mix and match parts and then allow the still images to move.

(Sources: slashfilm.com - news.bbc.co.uk) Ridley Scott has plans for not one, but two prequel films. Scott referred to the two films as “prequel one and two”, but admits that he is only working on part one at the moment. So who knows when he might ever get around to part two. Scott also confirmed the previous report that he will shoot the prequels in 3D.

Director Sir Ridley Scott has revealed that his 3D Alien prequel will be “really nasty” and will respond to the standard set by James Cameron’s Avatar.

(Source: latimes.com)  If you think we’ve already been inundated by 3-D with “Avatar” (which was shot in 3-D) and “Clash of the Titans” (which was converted later), get ready for a full-on deluge: nearly every big-budget holiday movie next year will be in 3-D, as will future films as diverse as the ” Spider-Man” reboot, the Taylor Lautner action- comedy “Stretch Armstrong” and Martin Scorsese’s children’s-book adaptation “The Invention of Hugo Cabret.”