The June 2013 Follow-Up Post

If you're new to my follow-up posts, these are a collection of brief updates on topics I've previously written about, but that I don't believe require an entire new post to themselves. The original posts are linked below for your convenience. Doing one of these every six months has been working pretty well, but there's been a lot going on lately, and I'm finding I have more than enough content to shorten that interval a bit.

"Doctor Who Prepares For a Milestone - If you haven't heard yet, a few days after I wrote about the season finale of the latest season of "Doctor Who," we got the bombshell announcement that Matt Smith would be leaving the role of the Doctor after this year's Christmas special. Now we're in the midst of another round of speculation about who the next Doctor is going to be. Will we get a black Doctor? A female Doctor? Personally, I'm still reeling from the suddenness of the announcement. I really like Smith in the role, and it feels like he's been here for less than no time at all. Three series is a perfectly respectable tenure though, and I can't begrudge the actor for wanting to move on. Still, if it were up to me I'd pick an older actor for the next round, so playing the Doctor won't likely to be a stepping stone to better career opportunities.

The Next Movies Becoming TV Shows and Amazon's Pilot Experiment - I talked about five pilots that were being considered for television series: "Beverly Hills Cop," "About a Boy," "Bad Teacher," "Zombieland," and "The Joneses." Well, two are headed to TV and three are not. "About a Boy" is on NBC's fall schedule, and CBS has "Bad Teacher" for midseason. Bravo passed on "The Joneses," and CBS passed on "Beverly Hills Cop," a surprise since it was one of the most high profile projects this year. There was mention of it being shopped around to other networks, but I haven't heard anything yet. Meanwhile, the "Zombieland" pilot was part of the Amazon Instant Video experiment, where feedback from the general public was solicited as part of their development process. According to writer/producer Rhett Reese, we "hated it out of existence." Instead, Amazon will move forward with political comedy "Alpha House" and Silicon Valley themed "Betas."

Bring on the Movie Musicals! - Did I call it or what? "Beasts of the Southern Wild" star Quvenzhané Wallis will be headlining the new version of "Annie" opposite Jamie Fox, and it's already scheduled for a Christmas 2014 release date. The other musical project that's seen a lot of movement in the past few weeks has been "Into the Woods," which is being put together by Rob Marshall for Disney. So far Meryl Streep, Johnny Depp, Chris Pine, Jake Gyllenhaal, Emily Blunt and Christine Baranski have been named as potential castmembers. This is shaping up to be a big one, though I'm a little worried about the vocal chops for the actors who have been cast so far. Meanwhile, it was announced today that Clint Eastwood is going to direct a big screen version of "Jersey Boys" for Warner Brothers.

Disney Buys Lucasfilm?! - I've written quite a bit about the development of the new "Star Wars" films, but it's important to remember that the "Star Wars" franchise isn't just the films. So while everyone has been enjoying the speculation over what J.J. Abrams is doing, it should also be pointed out that in the same period of time Disney has put the brakes on nearly all the remaining "Star Wars media. They cancelled Cartoon Network's "The Clone Wars," in favor of developing a new Disney Channel cartoon currently titled “Star Wars Rebels,” set to premiere in 2014. Game company LucasArts has been gutted, and projects like "Star Wars 1313" cancelled. EA has landed a deal to exclusively develop future "Star Wars" video games. However, there are rumors that Disney thinking about resurrecting that live-action "Star Wars" TV series. Maybe they could pair it with "Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D."

Finally, a couple of programming notes. I've decided that I'm going to blog write-ups for each individual episode of the last half-season of "Breaking Bad," when it comes back in July. I've never tried this with a television series before, and I figure this is good one to start with since I'll definitely be watching every episode very close to the time they air (through iTunes), and there are only eight episodes left. I'm pretty close to finishing "Veronica Mars," and I'm evaluating what series to move on to next. "Carnivale" looks like a pretty likely contender, and then "Dead Like Me." Finally, I want to do another round of review-a-day posts similar to last year's July Experiment. It'll have to be in the fall at the earliest though. I've been thinking about solely writing about revisiting films I've already seen, though I don't think I could sustain that for a whole month.

I'll keep you updated.
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