• Robert Downey Jr will go straight from Iron Man victory lap to Guy Ritchie’s brave attempt to overcome his wife’s fatal pull Sherlock Holmes movie. The project is being fasttracked in order to beat that other Sherlock Holmes movie, the one with Will Farrell and Borat, to the screen.
• So much for “final offers”: the day after AFTRA ratified their deal with the studios, news breaks that the AMPTP has offered SAG a $10 million, retroactive-to-July 1 bonus if they agree to ratify the contract by August 15.
• The NY Times is getting a cash infusion by selling the development rights of their stories to Hollywood studios. The most recent story to go on the block (and the 15th in two years) is “This Strange Thing Called Prom,” a June 22 piece about students at a multi-culti Brooklyn high school preparing for the big night. Miramax bought it, but hasn’t yet attached any talent.

• The members of AFTRA have ratified a proposed deal with the APMTP over a new contract. This wrecks SAG’s hopes that they’ll be able to use the dissatisfaction of the hundred-thousand-plus actors who belong to both unions as leverage against their own stalled negotiations. Another factor to SAG’s woes: after the WGA strike, nobody wants to be out of work again.
• Variety confirms Nikki Finke’s report that the Weinsteins are looking for a financing partner to help them get Quentin Tarantino’s Inglorious Bastards made in time for premiere at Cannes 2009; the studio has already found a moneybag for Rob Marshall’s Nine in Relativity Media.
• Palisades Media has picked up the just-shuttered Tartan UK’s 400-film video library, which includes films like Super Size Me, In the Mood For Love, and the works of Bergman and Pasolini.

• AFTRA will announce the results of their guild’s ratification vote on a prospective contract with the AMPTP today. It’s said to be “widely anticipated the terms will be accepted,” despite SAG’s pressure on their overlapping union to vote no in order to get a new/more favorable deal.
• Robert Schwartz looks at three of New York’s outdoor summer film festivals, including Rooftop Films.
• William “Cruising” Friedkin will direct the Milan premiere of the opera based on An Inconvenient Truth.
• Kinky Boots, one of those newfangled British comedies where somebody saves something through the power of something that somebody else thinks is naughty, is going to become a Broadway musical.

• Hancock is expected to make around $100 million this weekend, simply because Will Smith + July 4th = boatloads of money, regardless of negative buzz.
• SAG still doesn’t have a contract, but nobody seems to be particularly concerned. According to Variety, “There’s a ubiquitous sense among studio and network execs, talent reps and multihyphenates that SAG does not have the bedrock of support among its members to call for a work stoppage.” Meanwhile, Tom Hanks is supporting a ratification of the AFTRA deal, which would almost certainly nix any possibility of a SAG strike, whilst Jack Nicholson wants his compatriots to hold out for a better deal.
• Sacha Baron Cohen will play Sherlock Holmes opposite Will Ferrell’s Watson in an as-yet untitled comedy based on the detective stories. But they’ll have stiff competition from a competing Sherlock film being developed by the week’s most famous male maybe-divorcee, Guy Ritchie…right? [crickets]

• The Screen Actors Guild are currently without a contract. The AMPTP offered a “final offer” late yesterday in hopes of nailing the union down before their previous contract expired at midnight, but SAG insisted on giving the “deeply flawed” proposal the once-over before meeting with the studios on Wednesday. They’re probably just stalling until AFTRA votes on their tentative deal with the AMPTP next week.
• Variety takes note of the summer’s box office sleepers thus far, including The Strangers, which has quietly crossed $50 million, and What Happens in Vegas, an alleged bomb which nonetheless will almost certainly make close to $100 million.
• The Gillian Anderson comeback train rolls on. The X Files star has acquired a biography of Martha Gellhorn for her to star in and her production company to adapt. Gellhorn was a pioneering war correspondant and sometime wife of Ernest Hemingway.
• Philip Noyce will likely direct Edwin A Salt, a thriller in which Tom Cruise will play a “CIA officer who’s accused by a defector of being a Russian sleeper spy. He must elude capture long enough to clear his name.” Yes, Tom Cruise has now become so boring that news of his next project is relegated to the bottom of the roundup. Such is the way of the world, I guess.

Have you been following The Hollywood Temp Diaries? It’s an anonymous Blogger blog with the tagline, “I am one of those barnacles on the hull of the good ship ‘Hollywood.’ These are my stories.” Good stuff, especially if you subscribe to that dirty secret that most Hollywood jobs are just as glamorous and exciting as, like, working anywhere else. The blog’s author, known only as Temp X, has been drawing a direct line between the impending SAG strike and total global apocalypse for awhile. A couple of days ago, s/he posted a “videotorial” to hammer home her/his case, and for people like me who haven’t been able to get it up to care much about an actor’s strike, it’s the perfect vehicle for impressing the seriousness of the situation. More here.