Here’s some late breaking news today: Martin Scorsese is set to direct a biopic about Frank Sinatra, which is being scripted by Phil Alden Robinson (Field of Dreams). That’s about all that’s known so far, as the project is in early stages. Apparently Scorsese, whose past biopics include The Aviator (Howard Hughes) and Raging Bull (Jake La Motta), has been quietly developing this one for a few years and just recently secured both the life and the music rights.

Now it’s up to us bloggers to fill in the rest with speculation about what it will be called, what it will include and, most importantly, who will play the lead. Most writers are guessing that Leonardo DiCaprio will land the part, but I’m hoping Scorsese concentrates on the later years so that Dennis Hopper can reprise his portrayal from the Australian film The Night We Called It a Day. After all, isn’t it about time Scorsese directed Hopper? They were both in the Scorsese-produced Search and Destroy, but that’s just not enough. At least let Hopper play the old Sinatra after DiCaprio (or Robert Pattinson) plays the young version. And obviously Kate Beckinsale gets to reprise her role as Ava Gardner from The Aviator, right?

Also: if the title is anything other than The Chairman of the Board, I’m not going to see it. So what if it’s too close to a movie starring Carrot Top? It’s time to take the name back for Ol’ Blue Eyes!

Okay, let’s see what the rest of the net is saying about this exciting project:
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As long as X-Men Origins: Wolverine is a success this weekend (and despite all its “bad luck,” it should do very well), Fox will follow it with another X-Men spin-off, this one detailing the back story of Magneto. Outside of that project, which has been in the works just as long as the Wolverine film, there’s interest in solo movies for Gambit, Deadpool and Emma Frost (White Queen), as well as a spin-off about the original X-Men team as students.

Recently, in another list, we called for an Origins film focused on the shape-shifting villain Mystique, for which we even suggested Brian DePalma to direct. That spin-off is still our first choice, but since there are so many great mutant characters in the Marvel Universe, we’d like to pitch ten more X-Men origin movies to Hollywood (not just to Fox). To go along with the studio’s idea of hiring an unqualified filmmaker (Gavin Hood) for the job, we also recommend a barely appropriate director for each film.

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• Shia LaBeouf will take a pause from Transformer movies and unofficial Hitchcock remakes long enough to star in an adaptation of the new John Grisham legal thriller, The Associate. The film will be produced by Lorenzo di Bonaventura, who oversaw past Grisham films The Client and A Time to Kill. Could this mean director Joel Schumacher will also be on board?
• Peter Farrelly (one of the brothers) and producer Charles Wessler are putting together a comedic portmanteau (or anthology) film with 24 shorts utilizing the writing and/or directing talents of such vets as Brett Ratner, Todd Phillips, Mike Judge and potentially Josh Gordon and Will Speck. The sole Farrelly will direct two installments, but for some reason his brother Bobby is not involved with the project.
• The media thrashing of Australia includes the film’s reception Down Under, where it isn’t being greeted as the national treasure Fox hoped it’d be. Sure, it didn’t open as big as Mamma Mia! there, but if you look at usual figures for Oz, a US$5.1 million opening is actually pretty good. Besides, did the studio really think Aussies would let it topple Crocodile Dundee for the title of national treasure?
• Is Kung Fu Panda now the animated feature to beat at the Oscars? The film racked up more than double the amount of Annie Award nominations Wall-E received.
• Blockbuster stores still exist? I guess the few still out there will now be making some side money through a deal to sell concert tickets via LiveNation. Wait, people still buy concert tickets in person?

Kevin Kelly, a contributor to Joystiq, i09 and countless other weblogs, will be weighing in on the intersection between film and video games every Thursday here on SpoutBlog. This is his introductory column; please welcome Kevin, ask him personal questions, shower him with flattery and/or rip apart his argument in the comments.

If you’d been holding onto a game controller or sitting deep in a multiplex somewhere a few weeks ago, you might have felt the shuddering groan of millions of video game and movie fans everywhere when the press release dropped the news: Brett Ratner is going to start making movies based on Activision’s cadre of video games. Maybe the Uwe Boll career path of making extremely bad movie adaptations of video games still appeals to him. It’s not clear what project will be first up, but given the fact that Ratner’s films have somehow made millions of dollars, it’ll probably be something fairly popular. Don’t rule out Brett Ratner Presents: Brett Ratner’s Guitar Hero: The Movie just yet.

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• Department of Bad Ideas In The Name of Box Office Equivalency, Part 1: Apparently inspired by the success of Indiana Jones and It Really Didn’t Make THAT Much Money, Paramount is hiring Brett Ratner to direct Eddie Murphy in a fourth Beverly Hills Cop movie. It was Murphy’s idea, and there’s currently no script.
• Department of Bad Ideas In The Name of Box Office Equivalency, Part 2: Apparently emboldened by the success of Transformers, Michael Bay is working on another film based on a toy: Ouija. Yes, that board with the alphabet on it that allows slumber partying fifth graders to talk to the dead.
• Department of Things We Can’t Complain About: In honor of their 85th anniversary, Warner Brothers is dipping into their catalog of 6,800 films to push forth a ton of new DVDs and reissues, including “sets of superhero films, musicals and Westerns, including three editions of the MGM’s How the West Was Won, all slotted for third-quarter release, followed in the fourth quarter by horror and holiday collections, including an ultimate collector’s edition of A Christmas Story.”

• Variety says the only American film currently locked into a competition slot at Cannes is Charlie Kaufmann’s directorial debut, Synecdoche, New York. Steven Soderbergh’s Che epic isn’t finished, and Woody Allen’s Barcelona film is caught up in international red tape. But it looks like we can look forward to new stuff from Nuri Bilge Ceylan and Philippe Garrel, as well as a documentary on Mike Tyson by James Toback.
• Squashing rumors that the film would be exclusively distributed via iTunes, IFC has announced that they’ll release Madonna’s directorial debut, Filth and Wisdom, in the fall, with a theatrical run concurrent with VOD as is their custom.
• Brett Ratner has been “tapped” to remake The Incredible Shrinking Man. I am only posting this story so I can screencap the incredible photo of Ratner at right. The black-on-black bow tie––who does that?

• They’re not a trade, but they’ve got the biopic casting news everyone’s talking about: MTV reports that Anna Faris has won the starring role in a film about Deep Throat star Linda Lovelace. The last time I wrote about this project was in March 2005; at that time, Courtney Love was set to star.
• Brad Pitt will replace Matt Damon in The Fighter, a drama about an Irish lightweight boxing champion. Damon, according to Variety, “had too many projects on his dance card to make the film on the schedule Par[amount] wanted.”
• Brett Ratner is going to make a movie about Frank Sinatra’s long-suffering valet, and guess which Rush Hour veteran is set to star? It’s going to be based on a book by William Stadiem, who says of Ratner, “I think he’s channeling Frank sometimes.”
• Magnolia’s recently-announced genre label has made two new acquisitions, both starring martial arts star Marko Zaror: Kiltro and Mirageman.

Earlier this week, Grady Hendrix (co-founder of Subway Cinema, the collective that puts on the annual New York Asian Film Festival) re-launched his Kaiju Shakedown Asian cinema blog at Variety. Yesterday, Hendrix posted a mighty listicle, in an effort to catch his readers up on the Asian film world gossip that they missed while the blog was on its “six month bathroom break.” And thank God he did, because otherwise, we would have never known about this post on Jackie Chan’s official blog, dated July 16 and titled “Absolutely No Fun”. An excerpt:

Today is Monday. I have to begin my fourth day of prosthetic make-up. Thinking about doing the same thing tomorrow just makes me feel like there is no joy in life. Supposedly, I was scheduled to finish filming my prosthetic make-up shots today. But they told me they needed an extra day because they haven’t finished filming all the shots. When I heard this news, my whole body felt like it was about to break down. I totally lost my appetite. I didn’t want to drink. I didn’t want to speak. I didn’t want to make any phone calls. Even if someone called me, I didn’t want to answer the phone. I didn’t want to write my diary. If they needed me to film, then I would film. Otherwise, I didn’t want to do anything else…

The prosthetics are for a film Chan is making for The Weinstein Company with Jet Li, called Forbidden Kingdom, and since the pairing of the two stairs makes this a huge project for martial arts fans he’s apparently contractually forbidden from releasing pictures of the “no fun” make-up job (Twitch linked to some cast photos in June, but there are no close-ups of Chan). We wouldn’t want to wish this kind of suffering on anyone, but you’ve got to wonder: is Chan undergoing some kind of karmic retribution for continually enabling the ascendancy of Brett Ratner?

***Brian Grazer has hired Rush Hour auteur Brett Ratner to direct Playboy, a drama about the life and times of Hugh Hefner. It’s the third stab at a Hef biopic, after several drafts by Oliver Stone and a musical version (!) proposed by 8 Mile’s Scott Silver failed to pass muster. According to Variety, Ratner got the job by sending Grazer a Playboy pinball machine.

***Governator Arnold Schwarzenegger is expected to sign at least one two bills aimed at luring movie production back to California with tax incentives.

***ReelzChannel, a new movie-centric cable network, has picked up ten episodes of What I Learned About (Blank) From The Movies, a Best Week Ever-esque series in which “comedians comment on those ‘valuable life lessons’ hidden inside” classic films.

***The Weinstein Company’s quest to turn Tarantino’s half of Grindhouse into an overseas hit has failed. The extended cut of Death Proof has earned just $10 million in four weeks across ten European markets. Variety adds insult to injury by noting that “French patrons were much more interested in maintaining support for Shrek the Third in its second frame.”