Though five new wide releases open on Christmas, 
- “If they had to do it all over again, would DreamWorks co-founder Steven Spielberg and his partner Stacey Snider have left their lucrative deal at Paramount Pictures, where their slate of films had thrived, if they had foreseen the worsening financial environment?” According to Anne Thompson, DreamWorks is having a lot of trouble raising money during the credit crunch, and Spielberg and Snider may have to settle on a smaller business plan. On her blog, Thompson simplifies things: “But it’s Steven Spielberg! It doesn’t matter. The banks aren’t lending to anybody. It’s sheer bad luck.”
- Ari Folman is following up his winning animated doc Waltz With Bashir with an adaptation of Stanislaw Lem’s sci-fi short story The Futurological Congress, which will begin as live-action then transition to animation. “Think of your favorite young actress. She’ll appear that way at the beginning, and then as the film goes on, she’ll be drawn like she’s 50,” Folman explains. So, like Kate Winslet in The Reader, but as a cartoon rather than with distracting aging makeup.
- Barry Sonnenfeld will direct another sci-fi action comedy called The How-To Guide for Saving the World, which sounds like The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy if Arthur and Ford had been able to use their book to twart the Vogon’s demolishon of Earth.
- Billy Ray will direct his own adaptation of the supernatural novel Conjure Wife, which has been filmed three times previously. The premise sounds like Bewitched as a horror film.
- Adam Shankman, who raised his comedy rep recently with Prop 8: The Musical (and may lower it again now with Bedtime Stories), has added another musical and another f/x extravanza to his pipeline. The former is the high-concept Bob the Musical; the latter is the long-in-works revival of Sinbad.
