We’ll get to the story in a second but first we must give props to NotZombies.com for creating this photoshop because nothing could be more perfect for the top pic. Visit their site to see the full image and read their awesome explanations for why each character looks the way they do.

Ahem, now, click ahead to find out why Gale Anne Hurd thinks AMC’s The Walking Dead is like Downton Abbey plus thoughts on Glen Mazzara’s departure, a Walking Dead movie, and more! 

Hello, my name is Storm. Actually it is Ororo, Ms. Munroe if you’re nasty. I’ve been called a few other names in my time but “Sandy” is certainly not one of them. So why are news organizations all over the country referring to me as such? And why are they speaking about me as if I were evil? Storm is friendly!

As we know, there is a dearth of women working behind the scenes in Hollywood, even if we have seen a slight improvement since the 1990s. But when I say “improvement,” don’t get too excited. Using the numbers from the LA Times, women working high-level jobs in non-acting jobs in film — directors, producers, etc. — accounted for 18 percent of the whole lot, up from 17 percent 14 years ago. “Improvement” over the course of 14 years amounts to one percent. In politics, that’s within the margin of error, so it might not even be that accurate. This means less movies that are geared directly to women. And now, one of the women who usually appears in front of the camera, Meryl Streep, is using all that attention we pay to her to ask a very important question: “Why? Why? Why? Don’t they want the money?”

To be more specific, as Sherlock Holmes would expect us to be, he’s now the most portrayed literary human character in film and television according to the Guinness Book of World Records, beating William Shakespeare’s Hamlet for the title. Hmm…I wonder how that happened…

A new study by the LA Times revealed a fact that is usually just a joke made by comedians and angry fans of Drive: the majority of the voting members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences is made up of white, elderly men, and this is why generally lackluster “Oscar-bait” movies like War Horse and Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close end up nominated over more edgy fare (like Drive). The Academy says it wants to diversify, and it’s nice of them to notice the need to do that now that everyone expects the Oscars to be 100 percent boring 100 percent of the time.

Top pic also taken from the LA Times story, because it looks like the creepy picture from The Shining, and I dig that.

If we’re being honest, I think it’s fair to wonder what William Shatner thinks of Star Wars in comparison to Star Trek, even though the answer is most likely an incredibly — but respectfully — biased one. And that’s exactly the case! In the video above, watch this delightful interview with Shatner and witness him waffling on the merits of special effects in both of the legendary sci-fi offerings. And then watch the fan fiction universe go crazy over the idea of Captain Kirk and Princess Leia hanging out together.

(via Geek Tyrant)

Here is something for the brethren: Right now in San Francisco, there is a ballot measure to make male circumcision illegal, citing the “preservation of the penis.” So to spread the message about the measure he wrote himself, Matthew Hess — who calls himself an “intactivist” (see what he did there?) — created Foreskin Man, righteous defender of eight-day-old baby foreskins and their eternal attachment to the mighty penis. Hess cites his main goal as “making cutting boys’ foreskin a federal crime.” And he swears, this has nothing to do with religion and everything to do with stopping “male genital mutilation.” Now, the last thing we want is to see babies being mutilated. But let’s look at this perfectly tolerant, not-at-all-anti-Semitic comic he’s drawn.

To the surprise of no one, Arnold Schwarzenegger has stopped pursuing his reignited entertainment career while he deals with his troubled marriage and the revelations that he fathered a child with his former housekeeper. Several new projects had been lined up including a film and the one we were the most psyched about/dreading, the animated Stan Lee collaboration, The Governator.

An interview on Salon with author Alexandra Robbins, who has just written The Geeks Shall Inherit the Earth, has concluded what we’ve known for years: being popular in high school does not necessarily mean you’ll be successful as an adult. And further, the qualities that make someone an outsider will help them succeed where the popular kids failed. Hey, welcome to the nerd party! It’s been going on for years, actually! But here was a rather upsetting finding by Robbins: the teachers might be making the high school social environment worse.