I just bought my tickets to Spider-Man
on opening night. If they’re available here,
they’re bound to be available elsewhere, too.

As you might have noticed, I’m getting the
Paramount Pictures press releases now. Below The
May/June DVD release schedule includes the
following genre options: Star Trek: The Next
Generation – The Complete Second Season Gift
Set (May 7), Vanilla Sky (May 21),
Graveyard Shift (May 28), and Silver
Bullet (May 28).

The (sketchy, not officially confirmed) details
are here.
So, who won’t be at Episode 2 opening night?

The listings to the Spider-Man movie soundtrack
(due out April 30) are available from this
fan site. It’s got 19 tracks, including four
that actually appeal to me. Track one is the
theme song to the 1960s cartoon incarnation of
Spider-Man. Tracks 17 and 18 are tracks of Danny
Elfman‘s score. Track 19 sounds oddly
intruiging; Aerosmith has
done a cover of that original theme song, and it
will be included on the album.

YaRness writes, (from the as-seen-on-slashdot dept.)Sci Fi Wire reports: “Stephen Norrington (Blade) will write and direct an adaptation of the classic Japanese SF anime Akira for Warner Brothers, according to The Hollywood Reporter. Jon Peters [“Batman”, “Rain Man”] will produce.”So, adaptation means what, western-style cartoon (yuck), live-action (equal yuck)? I can’t see this project turning out anything palatable. Does anyone have any ideas as to how they might make this something worthwhile, either in $$s or other measure of success?

Ask and ye shall receive. Here’s
some news on Spirited Away, the highest
grossing film in Japanese history, created by the
director of Princess Mononoke, which
used to be the highest grossing film in Japanese
history.

Another review of the Spider-Man film is up on this page of the Home Theater Forum. There are some spoilers about the premise, so be careful in reading it. The short version: a person who hadn’t read the comics found the movie imperfect, but highly recommendable, and gave it 4 stars out of 5. The part that excites me most is the 120 minute running time, which tells me that Raimi wasn’t asked to edit for length. (To see what kind of damage that can do, compare the two versions of the bedroom scene on the X-Men DVD.)

There’s a review of the Spider-Man review available here. This is not as positive as the review of the novelization we had here in March. Reading David Poland’s review, it sounds like some moments were cut for length, and the editors chose the wrong moments. Still, there’s spoiler-free and spoiler-full versions of the movie review for those who want to read the opinion of someone more familiar with the comic book.

Cinescape
has two articles about a Spider-Man sequel today.
This
one is about the studio side of the
arrangements, and this
one is about Sam Raimi’s side.

Sam Raimi, director of the upcoming Spider-Mean, was interviewed by anAustralian reporter. The interview is available on AICN right here.