Surprise profits and an open-ended final scene made a sequel to The Strangers inevitable. There was confirmation today from the trades that the original’s writer/director, Bryan Bertino, has been hired to type up another scary script.

The first movie, released this past June, made $54 million domestically on a $9 million budget.

Bertino will write the next installment, but he hasn’t been hired to direct it yet.

In my review of the original I wrote “Bertino shows a lot of talent as a director. As a writer… not so much.” The simple, plot-filled script was the worst part of the movie, in my opinion. Liv Tyler wasn’t particularly good either.

But Rogue Pictures took a look at their return on invest and thought they were good enough.

The Variety article says they’re planning on a possible franchise, like the Scream movies. It’s an odd comparison considering those movies are about poking fun at horror cliches while The Strangers used just about all of them.

Liv Tyler and the masked villains are expected to return for the production, planned for early 2009.

George Clooney is in talks to star in Up in the Air, a movie being adapted and directed by Juno and Thank You for Smoking director Jason Reitman.

Reitman apparently has been passionate about the project for over five years, setting it aside to work on his breakout smoking movie and Diablo Cody’s debut script about a pregnant teenager.

Up in the Air is a novel by Walter Kirn about a man who is only comfortable in the pressurized cabin of an airplane. He’s on his way to his goal of one million frequent flyer miles. But his life as a “corporate downsizer” is about to change.

It was featured on Amazon’s “Best of 2001” list for fiction. (Side note: Also on the overall list that year was Killing Pablo, a novel also being adapted for the screen next year, plus about four or five others that are all movies now.)

With Reitman’s back-to-back success in the indie circuit, it looks like he’s moving to the big time. DreamWorks has already agreed to distribute the movie and now Clooney may be on board. Things are really happening for this 30-year-old and I’m happy for him. He’s extremely talented and having Clooney even consider it is a huge step towards further success.

There was a bit of a mix-up yesterday over who would be directing the first of the planned Tintin trilogy. Originally Steven Spielberg was scheduled to direct and Peter Jackson would helm the second, leaving the third to a possible joint collaboration between the two great talents. That’s still the case, but here’s what happened.

Herge Studios, who holds the rights to the character Tintin and represents the author, erroneously announced Jackson would take over the first. A few places ran the story and wound up looking ridiculous. If you can’t believe the people who own the rights, who can you believe? That was a rhetorical question because the answer is no one.

The people who represent Spielberg and Jackson have since set the record straight. Spielberg will do the first Tintin movie as his next film, which is disappointing because he follows up Indiana Jones with a motion-capture animation movie instead of finally making his Lincoln biopic or the Chicago 7 movie he abandoned recently. Jackson will finish post-production on The Lovely Bones and work on writing the two Hobbit movies.

But in the announcement are the first official story details. The plot will follow two books “The Secret of the Unicorn” and “Red Rackham’s Treasure,” written by Herge in 1942 and 1944. They’re about Tintin’s adventures with Captain Haddock to discover model ships with maps that lead to underwater treasure.

Thomas Sangster (the cute kid in Love Actually) has already been cast as the guy whose motions will be captured for Tintin and Andy Serkis (Gollum) will move around for a computer as Captain Haddock.

According to his own Facebook group, Aaron Sorkin is writing a movie about how Facebook was invented.

In case you’re old, Facebook is the popular social networking site that has eclipsed MySpace as the best place to share photos, games, and constant minute-by-minute updates of what you’re doing. It started as a membership site for Harvard students by Mark Zuckerberg and grew into a massive network of over 100 million active users. There are several lawsuits pending from his classmates who claim he stole their source code for the site.

Sorkin is the Emmy award-winning creator of “West Wing,” the screenwriter for last year’s Charlie Wilson’s War, and A Few Good Men. His other shows, still among my favorites along with “The Wing,” are the short-lived “Sports Night” and “Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip.”

I wish this was a cruel Internet prank, like the false “Cher as Catwoman” rumor that has been making the rounds at all the gullible websites. But Vulture seems to have found confirmation from producer Scott Rudin (No Country for Old Men), who will be working on this project with Sorkin and Sony Pictures.

By the way, I tried to become friends with Aaron to impress my friends, but he’s currently not accepting requests from lowly bloggers.

I’m keeping with today’s theme, Tuesdiesel.

French director Mathieu Kassovitz recently did an interview where he called his movie Babylon A.D. “pure violence and stupidity,” among other things. The blame, he explains, lies with the meddling studio, 20th Century Fox.

The movie is set in a dystopia version of 2019 and stars Vin Diesel as a mercenary transporting two people to New York.

Kassovitz’s candid conversation with AMC confirms rumors of a rift between the director and the studio. According to various reports, there were massive delays due to weather and a power struggle behind the scenes. One rumor is Kassovitz was coaxed back into production after a nervous breakdown.

While he doesn’t say anything about losing it on set, he did say this:
“I’m very unhappy with the film. I never had a chance to do one scene the way it was written or the way I wanted it to be. The script wasn’t respected. Bad producers, bad partners, it was a terrible experience.”

He continues to say Fox constantly interfered in order to make it rated PG-13. The studio ultimately took over the editing process, cutting it down to a “confusing 93 minutes.” “Fox was sending lawyers who were only looking at all the commas and the dots. They made everything difficult from A to Z.”

The movie is being screened for critics, but Fox seems to be limiting press exposure to the film before its release this Friday. So far there are five reviews on Rotten Tomatoes and they’re all negative.

Kassovitz defends his vision one more time by saying, “All the action scenes had a goal: They were supposed to be driven by either a metaphysical point of view or experience for the characters… instead parts of the movie are like a bad episode of 24.”

Today I’m only posting stories that have to do with Vin Diesel. It’s Diesel Day on News in Film. “Tuesdiesel,” if you will.

Mr. Vin Diesel talked to MTV recently and said there are plans for more sequels based on the character Riddick.

The science fiction character with night vision was first featured in Pitch Black, a movie that wasn’t bad but didn’t do so well at the box office. Willing to gamble on a spin-off, Universal poured over $100 million into the budget for Chronicles of Riddick. It only made about $58 million in the States on top of being a huge disappointment for the fans and what most people thought was the end of a potential series.

But Diesel never says die.

Apparently there are two more Riddick sequels being written by David Twohy, the director of the two movies so far. The third movie would probably take the character to the “Underverse” and the fourth would be a return to his home world of Furya.

“The Chronicles of Riddick was presented as a three part trilogy that would answer Pitch Black in the same way that Lord of the Rings answered The Hobbit.” A reading from the book of Diesel.

At this point the scripts haven’t been completed, so it’s a long way from reality. After they finish writing it, they’ll have to convince someone to pay for it before trying to shoot two more chapters to an unsuccessful series.  It’s probably not going to happen.

I loved the video game though. It was better than the movies. Another game called Chronicles of Riddick: Assault on Dark Athena is coming out “sometime in 2008.”

The trailer for Fast and Furious (the 4th movie in the series) is online featuring all your favorite players. There’s Ford, Chevy, Honda…

In those cars though are some familiar faces. Returning to the series are all four stars of the original in 2001. Paul Walker, Vin Diesel, Jordana Brewster, and Michelle Rodriguez. Sadly not coming back are the the’s in the title. Moment of silence for the the.

Vin Diesel and Paul Walker head back to the streets where it all began to blast muscle, tuner and exotic cars across Los Angeles and floor through the Mexican desert in the new high-octane action-thriller.

In the trailer below (originally from MySpace) Diesel and his pit crew rob a land train full of fuel worth an estimated $1.4 million on the streets. Every other website is doing the hack gas prices joke. Here’s where I go with it: Aren’t all trains considered “land trains?”

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By the way, I think I spoiled the big reveal that it was Vin Diesel behind the wheel, but if you didn’t already know that then you’re an idiot… which makes you their target audience.  Yeah, I went there, Guy Who Painted Flames on the Side of His Honda Civic.

Fast and Furious drifts into theaters June 5, 2009

In 2004, Morgan Spurlock burst on the documentary scene and reinvented the way people saw the medium. Plagued with a boring stigma and the far left rantings of Michael Moore, his doc Super Size Me was a breath of fresh air to documentary filmmaking. Meanwhile, he proved he was ahead of the curve on the growing health crisis in America. His film helped bring change to the fast food industry with effects like the disappearance of the phrase “Would you like to super size it?” But it used McDonald’s as an example of a bigger, more important problem in America: the declining health of its citizens.

Four years later Spurlock has made another doc, Where in the World is Osama Bin Laden?, this time tackling the seemingly impossible mission of tracking down the whereabouts of the most wanted man in the world, Osama Bin Laden. While the overeating gimmick in the original served to visualize the ongoing discussion, the tiresome search here is just repetitive without contributing to the murky purpose. No broader message is really being explored here, but instead it introduces more serious and important topics before steering past them completely.

Spurlock travels the globe, stopping in Egypt, Morocco, Afghanistan, and Pakistan to talk with ordinary people about their thoughts on America, the war on terror, and to constantly ask the question everyone wants to know, “Where is Osama Bin Laden?” I find it hard to believe he thought he was going to get more than the chuckles and shrugs the movie is riddled with.

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As the director of an inexcusable amount of bad video game adaptations and the abysmal Alien vs. Predator, Paul W.S. Anderson has made a career out of taking the original work of more talented people and bastardizing it into reel garbage. He seems to have carved a niche for himself with brainless action trash, so maybe that explains why he’s blissfully unaware of his contributions to unintentional comedy.

Death Race is no different. As an awful remake of the 1975 original Death Race 2000, the goofy satire has been exploded away and replaced with a pseudo-gritty mess of poorly-constructed action sequences and incessant slow motion.

It’s like The Fast and the Furious movies only dumber and the cars have been “pimped out” with impenetrable armor and turret guns. But even gearheads and action junkies may lose interest as yet another car explodes on the circular track to no where. If only they had installed flux capacitors, we might’ve had something worth watching.

The plot presents a future United States penal system where inmates compete in a gladiator-like race to win their freedom. It’s simple. You only have to win five races, each with three stages, and part of the objective is to kill the other drivers. Meanwhile, the spectacle is broadcast on pay-per-view to millions while the warden calls the unfair shots. Ready, set, ugh.

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IESB.net learned Michael Keaton will voice a Ken doll in the Pixar sequel Toy Story 3. The actor previously worked with the studio on Cars in 2006.

They got the inside information from Jodi Benson, who voiced “Tour Guide Barbie” in Toy Story 2 and will return for Barbie voice work for the third installment. She’s also the voice of the Ariel in Disney’s Little Mermaid prequel on DVD Tuesday.

Not much is known about the story yet, but a possible synopsis was given to the Wall Street Journal a few months ago. “Woody the cowboy and his toy-box friends are dumped in a day-care center after their owner, Andy, leaves for college.” The screenplay was written by Michael Arndt, whose first and only movie, Little Miss Sunshine, won him an Oscar.  Andrew Stanton (Finding Nemo, Wall-E) wrote the treatment.

Tom Hanks (Woody) and Tim Allen (Buzz Lightyear) will also return, among other cast members.

Toy Story 3 is scheduled for a 3D release on June 18, 2010.