With The Dark Knight and Watchmen on everyone's mind, we are going to get a lot of dark and edgy "superhero" movies, centered on stories that tear down the myth of the caped crusader and show them to be the flawed individuals they truly are.

Capeshooters is the latest to tear off the Spandex. According to Variety, it's based on an upcoming comic book by Rob Liefield, cofounder of Image Comics, and will be produced by none other than Bryan Singer. After filming so many good superheroes Singer is apparently interested in exploring the "darker side of the subject." The timing, coming so soon after Tony Stark graced the screen, is probably coincidental.

So, what is particularly dark about this deconstruction? The TMZ angle! Capeshooters revolves around two slackers turned paparazzi, who specialize in shooting covert videos of superheroes. (And speaking of Stark, he probably would have loads of those videos. Wolverine, too.) They find themselves on the run after they stumble onto evidence that one particularly beloved hero is, in fact, a villain. (Harvey Dent, say it ain't so!)

It all depends on the upcoming comic book, of course, but it sounds like Watchmen already did this. And better. Still, you can't blame writers for trying to walk a mile in Alan Moore's shoes, can you? Perhaps the book will be more unique than it looks from this angle.

It used to be that the musicians with the beat were the Go Gos. Now the beat is getting manly. The Hollywood Reporter has posted that there's a new indie '80s comedy on the way called We Got the Beat, and Robert Hoffman has just joined the cast. He's been dancing his butt off in a bunch of films and most recently got to groove in the rain with Briana Evigan in Step Up 2.

Written and directed by John Artigo, the film follows "Brad, a high school football player who sets out to prove he's more than just a jock by quitting the team and turning his heavy metal band into a pioneering boy band." But that's not who Hoffman is playing -- he gets to be "Garth, the boy-toy and live-in lover of Brad's mother."

This sounds like one of those films that could be terribly bad, or terribly good. Here's to hoping it's all set to real '80s music and is awesome. The indie begins filming this month.

It was a bummer to learn that Franka Potente was backing out of Pope Joan back in May, but it looks like she's found herself another weighty gig to add to her plate. Variety reports that she has signed on to star in a new German drama called Flucht aus Tibet, otherwise known as Escape from Tibet. The film, which is based on a true story, will be the big-screen debut for writer and director Maria Blumencron.

Heading out of Che Guevara territory, Potente is moving over to Tibet to play Judy Cronenberg. The woman was a press photographer who led "a group of refugee Tibetan children over the Himalayas to safety nine years ago." There's nothing more being said about the story, which seems to be surprisingly free from the Internet (anyone know the details?), but it is a big German project. The film has received FFF Bayern's largest film funding -- $1.1 million.

It should be a little bit of time before we get to see Tibet, but in the meantime, of course, we can watch her play Tania in Steven Soderbergh's The Argentine and Guerilla.

When Ian Holm chased ambulances, so to speak, as Mitchell Stevens in The Sweet Hereafter, there was a certain amount of class to it. Yes, he was looking for lawsuits, but Holm managed to bring some heart to the role. But what would Sacha Baron Cohen do? I think it's safe to say that he'll have an entirely different technique as a personal injury lawyer; and hopefully one that doesn't put him in a one-piece thong again.

Variety reports that Fox Atomic has picked up a pitch written by Peter Baynham (Cohen's Borat co-writer) called Accidentes, which Baron Cohen will produce and possibly star in. It will focus on "a lawyer of Latin descent who transforms from contingency attorney to hero of the working class when he helps an immigrant win a judgment against his wealthy employer after a landscaping mishap. He also becomes the enemy of L.A.'s power elite."

I'd be surprised if Sacha didn't take on this role, but I imagine it will all come down to timing as he's also got some Sherlock Holmes action on the way and a Dinner for Shmucks. But if he can't do it, who could? Freddie Rodriguez?

Magical trends just never end! According to Variety, Walden Media has hired Karen Janszen to adapt Ingrid Law's book Savvy, which only just hit bookstores a few months ago. The rights have been optioned at least that long, but it looks like Walden is really racing it into production.

Savvy follows a family called the Beaumonts, who all boast remarkable superpowers. The hero of the story is young Mibs, who is quickly approaching her thirteenth birthday and the discovery of her own superpower or "savvy." Unfortunately for the Beaumonts, disaster strikes right on the fateful day, and Mibs finds herself in the midst of an adventure, where she will have to try to hide her new "savvy" when it makes itself known.
It sounds like The Incredibles, with a dash of Harry Potter and X-Men for color.

Interestingly, the story behind Savvy's publication is reminiscent of J.K. Rowling's. Law hails from my home state of Colorado, and all kinds of press outlets are making much of the fact that she resides in a mobile home with her daughter. That's not a bad thing! My grandma lived in one, and I have very fond memories of it. Anyway, if the success of Savvy has allowed her to move on to a grander home, that's cool, and I wish my fellow Rockies resident continued fortune.

If you're interested in reading the book for free, Penguin has released it online. Unfortunately, this freebie ends today, so I hope you're a fast reader. And if you've read it already, please sound off on its movie potential below!

Some police departments have a unit called the Special Investigations Section, where officers focus on catching dangerous, violent criminals in the act. The Los Angeles Police Department, fairly infamous for a lot of things anyway, has a SIS unit that's frequently been the subject of scrutiny for the way its officers operate under, ahem, somewhat looser rules than regular cops. And now somebody's making a movie about it!

A movie about cops who are loose cannons and don't play by the rules but they get the job done? What a fresh concept! I hope one of them gets shot when he only has two weeks left till retirement. I'm not quite sold on the title, either: At the moment, it's called SIS, though I bet Warner Bros. changes it before the film hits theaters. (Seriously, SIS? What do they call the cops in that unit? SISsies?)

From The Hollywood Reporter comes news that Warners is moving ahead with the project, with casting currently underway and Chris Gorak set to write and direct it. Gorak is a former art director (Fight Club and Minority Report represent some of his best work) who wrote and directed 2006's Right at Your Door (pictured), a fine psychological thriller about a dirty bomb that goes off in L.A. and separates a contaminated woman from her clean husband. The eight or nine people who saw Right at Your Door (rent it!) are pretty interested in seeing what Gorak does next, so I'll be keeping my eye on SIS.

Death is the ultimate dramatic device, but great art doesn't emerge from strong devices alone. In Take, the directorial debut of Charles Oliver, the impact of a single, startling tragic death immediately conveys the sense of watching a gravely serious movie, which is definitely the case. However, having immediately provided a tone, Oliver fails to follow up with a story powerful enough to justify it. That's not to say that the experience Ana (Minnie Driver) goes through after her son dies in a freak accident before the start of the film isn't relentlessly bleak, but there's hardly anything distinctive about the circumstances to make viewers care any more than they would if they were glancing at it in the morning headlines.

Still, Olilver has made a quietly observant work solely driven by the specific needs of two downtrodden protagonists with completely believable motives. In flashback, we learn that Ana struggled with her son's elementary school, which wants to put him in a special needs program. Meanwhile, she has a hard time communicating with her husband and finding decent work to get by. Elsewhere, reckless gambling addict Saul (Jeremy Renner) destroys his life in a whirlwind of debt. His misfortune, as it's shown in early scenes at a prison where Saul awaits execution, will lead him to accidentally murder Ana's innocent child, Jesse (Bobby Coleman).

The legendary Wendigo is getting another chance at the spotlight. According to The Hollywood Reporter, actor/producer Michael Emanuel is making his directorial debut with Maneater. The movie begins shooting on July 30th in L.A., although the leads have yet to be cast.

Maneater centers around the famous Algonquian myth of the Wendigo, an evil, cannibalistic spirit. Humans can either transform into it by engaging in cannibalism, or be possessed by it via a dream. If one of those unpleasant fates befalls you, you'll go crazy eating your fellow humans, your hunger never to be satisfied. So try not to dream up a wendigo spirit and for heaven's sake, don't eat the flesh of your fellow humans.

The cannibalistic aspect makes it the perfect fodder for a horror movie, and it's been used numerous times, most recently (and probably most notably) in 2001's Wendigo. Now Emanuel is taking on the legend, inspired by a story told to him in the 1970's. His version will follow a former FBI profiler who is now working humbly as a small town sheriff. He begins investigating a series of mysterious (and probably gruesome) murders, only to discover that the monster he's hunting may be someone he knows very well.

It sounds like the best X-Files episode never written, doesn't it? Or at least a really good issue of Wolverine. I think Emanuel needs to delay production, and offer it to Chris Carter or Marvel Studios. Both are in need of a good cannibal spirit story, don't you think?

The rumors surrounding Watchmen began even before shooting did, most of which centered on what might become of the book's ending. If you haven't read it, I won't spoil it for you (though you need to go out and buy a copy right now), but suffice to say, it's pretty dark. It's so dark that every fan is convinced it's unfilmable -- and certainly, the leaked scripts suggested that many scriptwriters felt the same way.

The rumors persist despite several reports to the contrary (including one from an extra that leaked months ago), but now Patrick Wilson is setting the record straight. He talked to the MTV Movies Blog and literally laughed off rumors that the film has a happy ending. "Ha! I have to say, if you know how much Zack believes in it, you wouldn't believe he would go that far from the graphic novel. I don't know how those rumors start, but that'd be a stretch!"

The only scary part is that it is up to the studio to decide what to cut out of the film -- but even if crucial character bits land on the cutting room floor, Wilson explains that they tried to smash the detail in wherever they could. They've added "little lines here and there" to flesh out the character's backstories, as things have been cut by sheer necessity. And hey, the little details are what the book is for. It's the essentials, like that jaw-dropper of an ending, that have to stick to the page.

Watchmen opens March 6th, 2009.

Over two years ago, Erik mentioned a new musical on the way called Bob: The Musical. At the time, it was described as a film about "a mild-mannered man who suddenly hears the 'inner song' of people's hearts after being struck in the head." The description was vague enough that the project could easily slide into good or bad territory. However, the fact that John August, Marc Shaiman and Mark Waters were writing the feature helped matters.

And now Parenthood scribes Lowell Ganz and Babaloo Mandel are getting their hand at the script according to The Hollywood Reporter. (It has also been worked on by Mike Bender, who penned the original pitch, Jon Lucas, and Scott Moore.) But the real improvement is the story, or at least, how they're describing it. The film will focus on a thirty-something guy named Bob "who hates musicals and wakes up to find his entire life has become one."

That's got to really suck. I wonder if it's the sort of musical where everyone suddenly becomes awesome singers, or if it will have a Joss Whedon twist and be mixed with good and bad singers? Whatever the case, I'm sold.