The Hollywood Universe – 6/6/08

1) Transformers won best movie at the 2008 MTV Movie Awards in early June. Online voters also made Johnny Depp a big winner, granting him awards for best comedic performance (Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End) and best villain (Sweeney Todd). Will Smith won best male performance for I Am Legend and Ellen Page won best female performance for Juno.

2) Actor-screenwriter Seth Rogen is moving ahead with a new film version of Green Hornet, with Rogen starring as the superhero character, for Sony Pictures, and adapting the film’s script with his writing partner, Evan Goldberg. The Green Hornet is the alter ego for Britt Reid, a bored playboy who inherits his father’s newspaper and hunts criminals with his sidekick Kato at night. No director is yet attached, but the movie is scheduled for release in June 2010.

3) Warren Zide of American Pie fame has optioned The Harvard Zombie Massacre from screenwriters Dan Hernandez and Benji Samit, and plans to begin shooting on the project early next year. The horror comedy centers on venerable Harvard University being overrun by the undead, and America's most brilliant minds must fend off America's most brilliant zombies.

4) Sticking to numbers, director Roland Emmerich’s next sprawling epic disaster movie is 2012, which he wrote with his 10,000 B.C. co-writer Harald Kloser, about yet another global cataclysm that leaves people fighting for survival. John Cusack and Chiwetel Ejiofor will star. Actors Danny Glover, Thandie Newton and Oliver Platt may be joining the cast. The movie is scheduled for a summer 2009 release with shooting to begin this summer, if an actors’ strike doesn’t delay things.

5) A massive fire at Universal Studios in Los Angeles, California destroyed the iconic courthouse square set from the Back to the Future movies, damaging the famous clock tower of the films. The studio’s King Kong exhibit that is part of their theme park tour, and a video vault containing more than 40,000 videos and reels were also ruined, though Universal announced they have duplicates of most of the footage. Several location sets of CBS’ supernatural series Ghost Whisperer, which shoots on the lot, were also damaged. The blaze broke out just before dawn on June 1st on a backlot stage and quickly spread. The cause of the fire is initially believed to be due to a construction work accident. Several firefighters dealing with the blaze suffered minor injuries.