My brother mentioned to me on the phone that the long awaited 4th installment of the Die Hard series is being filmed in Baltimore. Much to the chagrin of locals, Baltimore is merely a stand-in city for Washington DC.

I don’t think theres a whole post’s worth of news here, so lets just revel at how hilariously awesome the title is.
LIVE FREE OR DIE HARD.
Mother of god.

You can read all about Bruce Willis body double here.

Trailer for Die Hard 4 after the jump….
[Read the rest of this entry…]

A few recently surfaced newsbits regarding the Fantastic Four sequel:

• Beau Garrett will be playing Frankie Raye, a character that (in the comics) ultimately offers herself to be a new herald for Galactus, much like the Silver Surfer was before being kicked to the curb for turning his back on the big purple jerk. Prior to taking the role of herald, she’d had a relationship with Johnny Storm, which is confirmed as a story angle for the movie.  The former is generally undiscussed at the moment, but conveniently enough, it’d fit nicely with the story.
• Some set images surfaced HERE on the Hollywood North Reporter message boards, courtesy of memeber “seven.”  Images mirrored for your pleasure:

 

• IESB.net recently spoke with Chairman of 20th Century Fox Tom Rothman. Technically, it’s an interview, but there’s some interesting nuggets in there about the Silver Surfer in the sequel: “I will say this, we are investing a tremendous amount of money, time and care, to make the state of the art CGI Silver Surfer, to make him as great as modern technology can make him. And, the only thing that I would say is that the real, the ultimate pay off of that level of investment and doing it to its fullest possible extent, would really come if we are able to make future films. … We’re certainly putting everything that the business has to offer behind it in the hopes of doing that, in the hopes that the Silver Surfer has a long life. … I will tell you that the first teaser that we are going to put out of the movie, which will be very early in the new year, the first teaser will definitely reveal the Silver Surfer. So people won’t have long to wait to judge how well it is done.”

Interviews:

• Kurt Busiek talks about his current run on Superman, which is an excellent, excellent read. I typically find Superman dull and uninteresting, but Busiek’s doing a bang-up job on the series, and with only 3 issues out so far, there’s plenty of time for you to get on board. HIGHLY RECOMMENDED. (I mean the book. Interview’s good too.)
• Brian K. Vaughan talks about the Dr. Strange mini that starts tomorrow, which sounds strangely interesting. This man can virtually do no wrong when he puts his pen to paper, so to speak, so I have no intention to miss this one.
• Gregg Hurwitz will be writing Marvel’s upcoming Foolkiller book for their MAX line, which I guess we can all preview in tomorrow’s MAX preview book. The interesting part of the article is in the middle, where he says, “I was doing a book signing in Florida with Brad Meltzer and I mentioned to him that I had always loved the Punisher. He put me in touch with Marvel Executive Editor Axel Alonso and things clicked, which led to Foolkiller.” Looks like Brad Meltzer might be opening a lot of doors for authors to break into comics.
• Marv Wolfman is writing Nightwing, starting TOMORROW. It was going to be a 4 issue stint, but now he’s on for a longer haul, thank goodness. There’s preview pages too! Go look!
• Everyone’s talking about Ed Brubaker‘s book Criminal, which hits tomorrow. In fact, we’ll be talking about it in a second…

Burger King will be offering 4$ X-Box and X-Box 360 games along with their value meals according to Gamespot. There will be 3 games which will be total Burger King propaganda featuring none other than the extremely creepy Burger King driving bumper cars, racing bikes and most disturbingly of all sneaking around and force feeding people Burger King food.

As if the King wasn’t a bone chilling enough character that I would put on par with your average clown when it comes to creepiness but now to top it off he wants to assault my colon by force feeding me those horrible Burgers?

I think this promotion is a great idea except that I don’t have an X-Box and I don’t get Burger King promotional items since the gut wrenching Pokemon promo of 1999. These issues shouldn’t affect most people…

As cheap and propagandaish as this may seem we’re still talking about what is essentially a 4$ game. Under 10$ including the meal. It’s hard to beat that.

Thanks to spooie for the heads up

Poking around the Newsarama forums, I came across a thread that revealed this image from a recent issue of Wizard, featuring the cast of C.B. Cebulski and Karl Moline’s upcoming Loners book:

From left to right, the characters are:

• Penance (former member of Generation X, insanely convoluted backstory)
• Darkhawk (awesome!)
• unknown (speculation suggests she’s a legacy character for the Silver Samurai, but nothing confirmed at all)
• Turbo (formerly of The New Warriors)
• Ricochet (formerly of The Slingers, a group that used suits and identities that Spider-Man briefly used when he was accused of murder… ah, the 90’s)
• Phil Urich (former good Green Goblin, now retired)
• Julie Power (formerly of Power Pack)
• and some sort of Spider-Girl (appearance matches May Parker in Spider-Girl, but it’s more likely Mattie Franklin – though I also staked her out for Omega Flight… maybe Arachne is the one on Flight?)

Marvel’s really repopulating the Marvel U with its female spider ladies, isn’t it? Ridiculous. Maybe they’re throwing them all against the wall to see what sticks. Anyway, Wizard has an old article on this, where they’re showing some concept art. Here they are, mirrored for your enjoyment:

Turbo	Seems to be Silhouette, the new Scorpion, and Jubilee	The UNKNOWN GIRL	Some more Turbo	Looks like Turbo mask concept sketches

I was hoping that the Opera web browser for the Nintendo DS would b ea relatively cheap piece of software. After all it’s not a game or anything. It’s just added functionality. The kind of thing you have built in to a lot of things.

While the browser will not be released soon in North America it will be released next week in Europe. Prices for the system, such as that at Gameplay have it at £25 which I won’t bother converting to US dollars as our prices on games are so much different. So much to say it’s equivalently priced to other new Nintendo DS games. So expect to pay as much in stores for this as you would for any other DS game when it’s released.

Check out the Opera Website to get a nice look at what the Opera browser for the DS will look like in action.

In a follow up to Thursday’s early reports of the series cancelation Spike TV has confirmed that Blade: The Series will not be renewed for a second season.

As is fully expected for any series of any popularity or quality getting canceled before or after it’s prime the hordes of fans are launching a futile campain to save the show.

There is also mention that there will be a DVD release though no details were announced to that extent.

Nintendo’s going back to the begining of time looking for games to release on the Wii Virtual Console. The November issue of Nintendo Power reports that the virtual console will include games from the Commodore 64. No hint at pricing or games is made but that’s no reason for people not to start speculating.

Cubed3 tells us that game company Epyx will have some of it’s games for the system.

I’ll be honest. I’ve never played Commodore 64. I have no idea what games we could be getting and I probably won’t be getting any of them. I just hope we get some Vectrex games at some point.