The Hollywood Universe – 3/17/08
 
1) The live action film adaptation of Japan’s manga cartoon Dragonball from 20^th Century Fox has been delayed until Spring 2009. Written and directed by James Wong, the movie stars Justin Chatwin, James Marsters, Jamie Chung, Emmy Rossum, Eriko Tamura, Joon Park, Chow Yun-Fat, Texas Battle, Randall Duk Kim and Ernie Hudson. Dragonball concerns an alien who is sent to destroy Earth and instead teams up with the humans to fight off hostile aliens and other enemies.

2) Alison Lohman will take the place of actress Ellen Page to star in director-producer Sam Raimi’s upcoming horror thriller Drag Me to Hell, about a young woman who comes under a supernatural curse, from a screenplay written by Raimi and his brother Ivan Raimi. Page had to drop out of the production due to scheduling conflicts and shooting on the film was temporarily delayed due also to the writers’ strike, but is now beginning.
 
3) Former criminal lawyer Mike Sobel has sold his screenplay Animals to Columbia Pictures for Neal Moritz’s Original Film production company. Animals is a post-apocalypse tale about the world’s animals turning on humans to take back the planet.

4) Famed Japanese animator Hayao Miyazaki will be putting out a new Studio Ghibli film, Gake no Ue no Ponyo (Ponyo on the Cliff.) It is a modern re-imagining of the Hans Christian Anderson fairy tale, The Little Mermaid. In the animated film, Ponyo is a fish who wants to live with a human boy, Sousuke.
 
5) The seventh and final Harry Potter novel, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, will be adapted into two movies, instead of one like the previous novels in the series, it has been announced. The Potter series, by author J.K. Rowling, has been the most successful fiction series in the world, and the movie adaptations have so far brought in 4.5 billion in worldwide box office for Warner Brothers Studio. The adaptation of the sixth story, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, has been filming since September, and is due for release in November 2008. The last book in the series was felt to have too many critical plot elements to be able to cut the adaptation for film length, and so it will be told in two parts, labelled Part 1 and Part 2, the first tentatively scheduled for release in November 2010 and the second following in May 2011.