Nobody Wants To Pay For Spielberg’s Tintin Flick We didn't moan when the credit crunch meant that our house got repossessed or that we had to give up food, but we never thought Tintin would be taken from us. Sadly, it looks like it has. Despite being masterminded by Steven Spielberg and Peter Jackson - the directors of some of the best loved and wildly overlong films about robot children and big monkeys ever made - it's been reported that the proposed 3D animated Tintin movie has been passed over by Universal for being too expensive. We genuinely didn't see this coming - we knew the global economy was fragile at the moment, but so fragile that the world will be deprived of a movie based on the racially dubious adventures a marginally popular ginger Belgian journalist made using prohibitively costly pioneering technology? We're in worse trouble than we thought.

Hasbro & Universal To Make Sweet Board Game Movies Together

What's the dullest thing you can think of? Playing board games? You're wrong - the correct answer was watching a movie based on a board game.

But that's what's going to happen. Universal has signed up with toy firm Hasbro to make a bunch of films based on Hasbro products, possibly starting with - seriously - a Monopoly movie by Sir Ridley Scott. Nobody seems to have much of a clue what this Hasbro/Universal Monopoly movie will be about, but if it wants to remain faithful to the game it'll need to be 10 hours long and cause a longstanding bitter rift within every audience who watches it.

Oh, and it'll need to be as dull as shit, too. And you thought movies based on videogames were rubbish.

Russell Crowe Gets To Be In State Of Play Now?

For an unmade movie remake of a political BBC TV show that anyone with a working internet connection can discover the ending to, State Of Play has been getting all sorts of fuss made over it lately.

Although, to be be fair, that isn't because State Of Play is a world-class movie in the making; it's because Brad Pitt stropped off production recently, right before it was due to start filming. But now, with Universal planning to sue Brad Pitt for the walk-out, State Of Play needs a new leading man, and fast. Step forward Russell Crowe, who Universal has been desperately wooing all weekend. Of course, Russell Crowe is a notoriously safe pair of hands, and won't demand constant script changes like Brad Pitt reportedly did, apart from requesting that his character performs a 25-minute multi-stanza poem about the fickle nature of material success right in the middle of things.

And that 30 Odd Foot Of Grunts performs the State Of Play title music.

And that the whole thing gets called Russell Crowe's State Of Play and is set in prehistoric times, and that Edward Norton's character is replaced by an otter in a baseball cap.