1. This morning, Rebecca Pahle at the Mary Sue noted that a couple of remakes were announced. The first is a Murder on the Orient Express remake. I don't think that is necessarily a bad idea, if you can pack in enough stars and make the movie smart enough to be a solid entertainment and not just a bunch of celebrities having fun. But the other announcement is where shit goes south:

Technically Paramount is rebooting The Naked Gun, not remaking it, but let’s not split hairs, hm? Taking over as Detective Frank Drebin will be Ed Helms...

This is just wrong. There's no point to a redo of The Naked Gun. Just make a funny cop movie, instead. Ed Helms, who seems to be trying as hard as he can these days to make me hate him, isn't the same kind of comedian as Leslie Nielsen was. Nielsen was a consummate straight man, and Helms is a fidgety awkward-comedy everyman. Those are two very different schticks. I hate this movie already.

2. Last night, Sony announced that even though The Amazing Spider-Man 2 doesn't come out for a half year, they've already greenlit not only a third Amazing Spider-Man movie, but also movies about Spider-Man foe Venom and Spider-Man villain super-team The Sinister Six. This announcement, to me, resembles the way Marvel Comics would announce series in the middle of the comics boom of the 1990s, where every character who was even remotely popular got their own comic, whether there was a story there or not. Speaking of the 90s, I know comics fans love him, but I think Venom is an incredibly dumb idea, an evil twin trope stretched beyond the breaking point with one of the dumbest origins in comics. His whole concept is: What if Spider-Man was a real badass? The answer to that should be: Who cares?