Today’s the hump day between the Telluride and Toronto film festivals. We’ll be rolling out some final coverage of the former as the day progresses, before moving on to a burst of coverage of the latter tomorrow. First, here’s a look at some of the trade news from the past few days that we missed over the long weekend in Colorado:

• Variety’s Pamela McClintock says a super summer for the studios is bad news for smaller/artsier films. “[W]ith the debut of one successful studio pic after the next this summer, indie distribs and studio specialty arms had trouble drawing attention to their pics and keeping even the most successful ones in theaters. How much this pattern will affect future release strategies remains to be seen.” But she has a prescription: “the box office success of horror titles this summer reinforces the notion that studio specialty arms and indie production companies need to balance out their slates with more commercial genre titles.”
• In Telluride, people seemed to either love or hate Todd Haynes’ I’m Not There, but Todd McCarthy offers the only lukewarm review I’ve seen. McCarthy says Cate Blanchett’s performance is “electrifying,” but the later section starring Richard Gere “is poorly conceived on every level, as it dramatizes and contributes nothing.” The critic’s assessment of the film’s cross-over appeal is pretty dismal: “In the end, it’s a specialists’ event.”
• A theatrical “spoof” of Alfred Hitchcock’s The 39 Steps will hit Broadway this fall.
• Sacha Baron Cohen has finally confirmed a rumor that’s been going around for a year: he’s following up Borat with Bruno, based on the fashion correspondent character from The Ali G Show.
• It’s old news by now, but in light of the recent “horror is dead!” hand-wringing, it’s significant: Rob Zombie’s Halloween remake broke box office records over Labor Day weekend, earning $30.6 million over four days.
• The SXSW Film Festival is still 6+ months off, but Matt Dentler and his team have already announced conversations with two special guests: documentary filmmaker Stanley Nelson, and composer/source cue generator/tea impresario Moby.
• Spike Lee will judge entries in the upcoming Babelgum Online Film Festival. The fest will award about $130,000 in prizes to six short filmmakers.

• The Rock will play “a Las Vegas cab driver who picks up a pair of siblings with magical powers” in Witch Mountain, which is set to “advance the storyline” of the Disney’s 70s movies about mystical orphans.
• Owen Wilson has dropped out of Tropic Thunder, an ensemble comedy currently being directed by Ben Stiller in Hawaii, for obvious reasons.
• John Goodman will lend his voice to the role of Paul Bunyan in the CG animated Bunyan & Babe.
• Rob Zombie has signed a two-picture deal with Dimension, which would suggest that Bob Weinstein has faith that Zombie’s Halloween remake is going to do well this weekend.
• Turner Classic Movies is turning their evening programming blocks over to guest programmers for the entire month of November. The guests will include a contest winner, a fictional character (Kermit the Frog), and Rose McGowan, whose “unpredictable” choices include A Place in the Sun and A Touch of Mink.

With Comic-con running through the weekend and finally wrapping yesterday, you probably opened your RSS reader this morning to find a seemingly endless backlogue of live blogs, Flickr streams and breathless “exclusives”. Me too — and after three hours of skimming, I’ve gleaned the following five takeaways:

1. There’s gonna be a lot of Black Sabbath in Iron Man

2. Rob Zombie might his Halloween remake a “re-imagining”, but he apparently had no interest in re-imagining the dumb-as-rails horror heroine.

3. Sorry, Robert DeNiro: you might have been forgiven for Rocky and Bullwinkle, but we will never, ever forget.

4. Beowulf could be the most Razzie-worth pile of crap since I Know Who Killed Me (more on that later today), but 100 percent of the world’s male film writers (and about 50 percent of the gals) will still give it a pass, and all because of the naked Angelina Jolie.

5. Jenna Jameson knows her way around a pun (scroll down to the part about Scarlett Johansson and “ins and outs”).