Five-Legged Iguana

AFTERTHOUGHTS (21)

21.1 First, some good news.
This took me a while, but I’d just like to congratulate the following, for winning at this year’s Scream Awards:

28 Weeks Later: Best Horror Movie
300: The Ultimate Scream; Best Comic-to-Screen Adaptation
Kate Beckinsale: Scream Queen (for Vacancy)
Grindhouse: Most Memorable Mutilation (Dismembered In Car Crash); Best Director (Quentin Tarantino & Robert Rodriguez); Best Scream-Play (Robert Rodriguez, Quentin Tarantino, Jeff Rendell, Eli Roth, Edgar Wright, & Rob Zombie)
Heroes: Best TV Show
Shia LaBeouf: Sci-Fi Star (for Transformers); Scream King (for Disturbia)
El Laberinto Del Fauno: Best Fantasy Movie; Best Foreign Movie (Spain)
Hayden Panettiere: Breakout Performance (for Heroes)

Harrison Ford and Neil Gaiman were also honoured, with The Hero Award and the Comic-Con Icon Award, respectively.

Again, to one and all, congratulations.

(Reviews of 28 Weeks Later, 300, Death Proof, Disturbia, El Laberinto Del Fauno, Planet Terror, Transformers, and Vacancy can be found in the Archive.)

21.2 Now, some bad news.
The WGA strike that many have feared has come to pass. Depending on how long this strike turns out to be, its effects could still be felt as far ahead as next year’s fall television season. (If the impending Directors Guild and Screen Actors Guild strikes next year also go into effect, it’ll make matters all the worse.)
It’s my understanding that Heroes should have new episodes all the way up to the December break, so we should get to see all 11 episodes of Volume Two. After that, all bets are off, particularly if the WGA strike stretches out over the next few months.
As for the other shows I keep track of here at the Iguana, I’m uncertain where they are in terms of their production schedule for their current seasons.
And as far as series kicking off their new seasons next year (like Lost and Battlestar Galactica), their start dates could conceivably be pushed farther away, should this strike prove to be a protracted one.

Apparently an early casualty of the weeks leading up to the strike, the spin-off Heroes: Origins, which I’ve talked about here at the Iguana, has been shelved by NBC.
It’s been pulled off the schedule at the moment (it was set to air at the end of Heroes’ current sophomore season), though I certainly hope it’s not entirely dead. Maybe when the WGA strike has been settled, and provided next year’s impending strikes can be averted, NBC can resuscitate production on Origins.

Meanwhile, film studios were busy for most of this year gearing up for the possibility of a writers’ strike, and went into hyperdrive on a whole slew of pre-strike priority projects, like the Justice League live-action film—which I talked about in Afterthoughts (19) and (20)—in preparation for next year’s strike possibilities. Scripts for high-profile projects scheduled to shoot next year for a 2009 release (like the aforementioned Justice League) were also stockpiled by the studios.
While some projects are getting fast-tracked though, others could get shelved or side-tracked, depending on where they are in the development phase.
We’ll also be seeing some of the films originally scheduled for a 2007 release (like Michael Dougherty’s Trick ‘R Treat and David Moreau and Xavier Palud‘s redux of The Eye) hit cinemas next year.

There are a whole lot of other ramifications and intricacies to the WGA strike that go well beyond what I’ve mentioned here, so if you want to know more, get on over to variety.com, which has a host of articles covering the strike.
And let’s hope this one gets resolved soon.

(Images courtesy of bloody-disgusting.com [Scream Awards 2007 and Michael Dougherty] and yahoo.com [Heroes].)