SNL's 34th season kicks off on September 13th, and the first hosting gig of the season will rest on the shoulders of the much beloved Michael Phelps, America's golden boy (many times over).
This is way more fun than a Wheaties Frosted Flakes box. Phelps has been talking a lot about using his celebrity status to grow the sport of swimming, and this seems like a good component of that plan.
Here's hoping he's as funny as Peyton Manning.
For a bit of funny this Wednesday morning, here's a Funny or Die video of Kristen Chenoweth performing a very musical intervention.
Fox plans to shake up the norm a bit this TV season by premiering the new series Fringe and the season opener of Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles on air and online. The catch? The only viewers able to tune into the online broadcast will be those on college campuses.
Many networks have adopted online viewing systems, allowing those of us without a DVR or Tivo to catch full episodes of our favorite shows online a day or two after they originally air, but Fox's decision to put Fringe and Terminator online at the same time they are aired signals shifts in the digital viewing process.
Fox made the decision when they noticed that a good deal of their site traffic comes from .edu addresses. It's a pretty cool way to make sure that your target audience doesn't miss your new show just because they don't have a TV in their tiny shoebox of a dorm room.
The new strategy may also help minimize illegal downloads of these shows, since .edu users are also one of the largest culprits of online pirating. It will be interesting to see what other networks follow Fox's lead on this one and put forth that extra effort to catch the college crowd.
More roller coaster news on the upcoming releases front. First, Harry Potter got pushed back eight months. Then Twilight got bumped up three weeks to take advantage of HP's vacated spot. Now Watchmen may be in trouble that will shelve it indefinitely.
Twentieth Century Fox filed a lawsuit against Warner Brothers earlier this year for making the $100 million Watchmen without having the distribution rights. Fox says that they have those rights, and want to stop the film's release. Warner Brothers' request to have the lawsuit dismissed was denied by a judge this week.
With that decision, the fate of Watchmen is in movie industry limbo. These types of battles can bury films for good, but with a film this high profile, with such great potential to be a hit, my bet would be that if the case goes Fox's way, they'll want a cut of the money, not the death of the film.
I was already looking forward to Revolutionary Road, the new drama that will reunite Titanic co-stars Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet. Now that I've read this Huffington Post snippet about Winslet's awkwardness filming their love scenes under the scrutiny of her husband Sam Mendes (who directed the film), I'm even more ready for the December release.
Winslet gave Entertainment Weekly something to look forward to about the payoff of that awkward situation: "I hadn't realized how much my chemistry with him since `Titanic' would still stick. It's great to discover we can just slip right into it, like muscle memory."
Nothing like a silly glimpse behind-the-scenes to get you ready for a new release.
After being absent from the blog for a couple of weeks, I thought I would ease back into things today. The Great '08 Move is mostly over, though a few boxes remain scattered around, waiting to be dealt with, so it's high time to get back to pop culture and see what I've been missing.
Like I said though, I'm going easy for now. Today EW.com had a run down of 20 Fall releases the EW writers are itching to see. It's pretty good, and there were even a few on there that I had no idea were coming out so soon (The Road in particular).
One of those exciting new releases appears to be stalled, though. Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince is being postponed until Summer '09 (hat tip: Perez).
Warner Brothers is blaming the writer's strike, basically saying they needed to shift around some of the big-money movies to protect their bottom line. That's a pretty crappy thing to do to fans, especially since this is basically the biggest movie franchise going right now. We'll see if this decision sticks, but until we know for sure it looks like we're down to Twilight for our fun fall book series adaptation.
