A week from now, Michael Fassbender will basically be a full-on movie star.  He's starring as the youthful Erik Lensherr, aka Magneto, in Matthew Vaughn's X-prequel X-Men: First Class.  While he headlines along with the excellent James McAvoy, playing a pre-paralysis Charles Xavier, Fassbender's riveting performance is the engine powering the entire movie.  His Magneto is at once an uncompromising, wrathful loner concerned with little but revenge and simultaneously a charismatic leader of mutants to be reckoned with.  It's enough to make you forget venerable Shakespearean Ian McKellen, and it's guaranteed to garner Fassbender a lot of deserved attention.

One of the many, many things that separate Alien and Aliens from their genre counterparts – and indeed the rest of their franchise – are the memorable, fleshed out supporting characters.  Whereas most films with killer monsters are populated by bland meatbags waiting to get eviscerated, Ridley Scott's space truckers and James Cameron's colonial marines make a big impression.  In Aliens, longtime Cameron muse Bill Paxton plays Private Hudson, a blustering jag who falls gloriously to pieces when the feces hit the fan.  A new video compiles every single one of Paxton's over-the-top line readings as Hudson, so you can see his entire catchphrase-packed character arc, without the fuss of, you know, watching a good movie.

Officially, Joseph Kosinski holds the distinction of being the helmer behind the high-grossing feature directorial debut ever, though his first film, Tron: Legacy, was almost certainly the most expensive film from a first-time director.  Though Disney was looking to rebuild Tron as a modern franchise, that digital ship may have set sail on a CGI ocean, and Kosinski's second feature will most likely be Horizons, a big budget science fiction adventure to star Tom Cruise.  But he's also circling another sci-fi actioner, Archangel, as a probable follow up to Horizons.

After making a strong impression in 2009 with his feature directorial debut Crazy Heart, Scott Cooper received a plethora of offers for his second feature, but he hasn't committed to a follow-up project until now.  Relativity Media announced today that Cooper will write and direct Out of the Furnace, a gritty homage to 70's thrillers about a freshly-released ex-con who sets out to avenge the death of his brother.

Ever since 20th Century Fox announced that Prometheus, Ridley Scott's return to science fiction, would not be the direct Alien prequel that it was when development began, rumors have run rampant about the film's relationship to the established franchise.  In that initial announcement, Scott promised that fans would recognize elements of Alien DNA, but that could mean a lot of different things.  It doesn't help that there is a whole team of paid employees disseminating false info to throw rabid fans off the scent.  A persistent rumor suggests that the huge, deceased creature from the original Alien will play a substantial role in Prometheus.  Now, a new, possibly dubious report once again repeats the Space Jockey rumor.

Rutger Hauer stars at the titular vagrant in Hobo with a Shotgun, and while that's definitely a memorable role, the actor is best known for playin Roy Batty, the poetically-inclined replicant pursued by Harrison Ford's Deckard throughout Blade Runner.  Recently, producers at Alcon Entertainment announced that they acquired the Blade Runner rights, and though they don't intend to remake the 1982 classic, a prequel or sequel is in the works.  Speaking to Hero Complex, Rutger Hauer revealed that unless his Batman Begins director Christopher Nolan is on board, he opposes the idea of any more Blade Runner films.

Director/producer Ridley Scott likes to keep a lot of projects in development, since its sort of a crap-shoot as to what will actually get the green light.  Deadline reports that Scott, currently hard at work on the science fiction prequel Prometheus, is looking to direct a biography of Gertrude Bell, a British archeologist, diplomat, photographer, and occasional spy who was hugely influential to British Imperial politics in the Middle East before Word War I.

Paramount Pictures has spent four years developing Dune, a new big screen version of science fiction novelist Frank Herbert's masterpiece first published in 1962.  After two directors and plenty of time spent pulling together a screenplay, though, the studio has opted to give up on the project, according to Deadline.  Paramount allowed their option on the film to lapse, but producer Richard P. Rubenstein hopes to find a new home for the enduring material.

Netflix's streaming Watch Instantly service is fast becoming America's favorite way to watch movies.  The library of available titles is so vast and mutable that you, the avid instant watcher, could no doubt use a guide as you navigate the streaming frontier.  Luckily for you, I'll be here every Tuesday to update you on the latest titles available for instant-watching, as well as bringing attention some gems out there in the instantly watchable wilds.

Logan Marshall-Green is joining Noomi Rapace, Michael Fassbender, and Charlize Theron as one of the leads in Ridley Scott's erstwhile Alien-prequel-turned-more-or-less-original-science-fiction film Prometheus.  Marshall-Green has had recurring roles on '24', 'The O.C.', and 'Dark Blue', and also appeared in the feature films Devil and Brooklyn's Finest.