Fair warning here: I spend a lot of this post casually dropping bits of details about the plot of Reamde. I say this not just because of spoilers, but because you aren’t going to believe that all of these things could possibly happen in the same novel. Well, believe me. They do.

According to Deadline Chris and Paul Weitz are all ready to write and produce Neal Stephenson‘s Reamde as a television show for Fox, and you should care because of the novel’s triad of major female characters.

Warner Bros. are working on a new television show that could be pretty great if done well. It’s The Wizard of Oz meets Game of Thrones and it’s called Red Brick Road. Uh oh, sound ominous. 

Orphan Black follows Sarah, a life-long petty con-artist, whose discovery of her dead doppleganger makes her think she’s on the brink of the biggest easy job she’s ever found. But then she uncovers the existence of dozens of women who look just like her living completely different lives around the world, and it turns out that someone is trying to quietly kill them all, including her. Well that escalated quickly!

(via Doctor Who Tumblr.)

Gareth Edwards‘ Godzilla remake has had a shaky time of things so far. It’s had a bazillion or so people working on its script (OK, more like five), which is usually not a good sign. And last month it lost two of its producers. But with original The Walking Dead showrunner Frank Darabont working on what is hopefully the script’s last rewrite and the start of production scheduled for March, it’s time for Edwards et. al. to move things along a bit. And that means casting.

Jumping on Tumblr this morning, you may have noticed a change. Starting today, the site is rolling out an updated dashboard. It will allow users to post a photo, video, quote, etc. without having to actually leave the dashboard. You can see what that looks like above. If you have multiple blogs you can access all of them in the same spot. Tumblr told Mashable this is “a step toward making the Dashboard a smaller and more streamlined experience.” I’ve yet to get the updated look, have you?

(via Mashable)

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A movie adaptation of Brian K. Vaughan‘s Y: The Last Man has been simmering for years, but unlike a lot of other more-than-half-a-decade long stints in pre-production purgatory, it’s one where we actually get interested instead of exhausted when we hear that the studio is still pushing people at the project. This is because while Y: The Last Man is the story of the last man on earth after a mysterious and instantaneous plague wipes out every male mammal on the planet except for him and his helper monkey in training, that necessarily means that it’ll be a movie with an enormous cast of female characters of all sorts.

Almost a year ago, New Line found a new set of screenwriters to take on the task of condensing the sixty issues of the comic into one movie, and the studio has just announced that they’ve chosen a director. It’s an unexpected pick, but one that I’m interested in seeing play out.

These days, it seems like Hollywood has finally discovered that dystopian young adult fiction is a trend that can make bunches at the box office, thanks to The Hunger Games. We can also look forward to The Host and the long awaited advent of a big budget Ender’s Game adaptation. But older young adults in their twenties and thirties can sit around saying “In my day, we walked fifteen miles to the library to pick up copies of Garth Nix‘s Shade’s Children and Lois Lowry‘s The Giver. And then we wrote our book reports with pencil and paper! And then gave it to our parents to spellcheck!”

But I actually had The Giver read to me at bedtime before I was ever assigned it in school, so I guess I have the most hipster dystopian YA cred of all.

After Salt made more than $300 million when its box office was tallied, Salt 2 seemed like an obvious choice. But after the first movie’s director bowed out of any franchise plans and Angelina Jolie herself rejected the first attempt at a script, things seemed dead in the water. At least until now, when Columbia Pictures has hired Becky Johnston to take another run at the script.

Robert Zemeckis tells MTV Movies that whether or not a sequel to Who Framed Roger Rabbit gets made at this point is entirely in Disney’s hands. The script, written by the people behind the first movie, is in, he thinks it’s good, and is just waiting on them. Or, as I said last month, “if this film was a baby, it’s parents would still be quickly looking away and blushing whenever their eyes accidentally met in the laundromat.”

But the only reason Roger Rabbit came up at all in the conversation is because he was asked which of his movies (which includes, lest we forget, the Back to the Future franchise, Death Becomes Her, and Contact) he’d like to see converted to 3D for a theatrical rerelease.

Oz the Great and Powerful just rubs me the wrong way, and I doubt it has anything to do with the intentions of the people behind it. There’s a part of me that, despite how hard I try to just judge the concept on its own merits, is put off by this re-folding of Oz story. Dorothy defeats a formidable female foe at the behest of a benevolent, if somewhat cryptic (seriously, Glinda, we couldn’t just explain the shoes at the get go and let her choose?) female figure of power. It’s not like Wicked isn’t already a hit broadway production, so I’m a little leery of a movie that plucks the only male character of power (and let’s remember that it was a power based on illusion and deceit, however well-meaning) from the story of The Wizard of Oz movie and reforms the setting to be about a bunch of powerful women begging him to solve their problem and telling him he’s a fabled hero.

That said, I don’t expect anyone to agree with me, trailers are not the full measure of plot, the movie still has a bunch of great actresses in it, it looks like it’ll be a delight to the eyes at the very least, and I’m stupidly happy to see the porcelain people from the book get their due in a movie adaptation. What do you guys think?