Since he reinvigorated the Mission: Impossible franchise with the nigh-universally lauded Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol, a big question has been just what Brad Bird would direct next, as his second live-action feature film. Anyone hoping that the animation maestro-turned-blockbuster-live-action helmer would get his passion project 1906 off the ground next might have to wait, as Brad Bird has signed on to Disney and Damon Lindelof's super-secret 1952.

So the Oscars are over and with them, awards season has finally come to a close.  The Artist dominated those high-falutin' Academy Awards, but with months of stuffiness and pomp out of the way, a different academy, the Academy of Science Fiction, Fantasy & Horror Films is looking to acknowledge excellence in genre films with the 38th Annual Saturn Awards.  The official list of nominations in film and television were announced today, so take a look.

This April will involve a lot of people crowding around giant televisions to watch Tom Cruise crawling around on the Burj Khalifa.  After Mission: Impossible III proved to be the franchise's least commercially successful installment back in 2006, there seemed to be assumption that both the series and Cruise were running on fumes. 

Then Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol closed out 2011 to a whole lot of acclaim.  The fourth film proved, amongst other things, that Cruise is still a movie star, Brad Bird can direct live-action with blockbuster aplomb and nimble wit, Paula Patton is a force to be reckoned with, and Simon Pegg can steal damn near any show.  You'll be able to experience the Kremlin exploding all over again, as Paramount has announced that Ghost Protocol is set to debut on Blu-ray, DVD, VOD, and digital download this April 17th.

A phenomenon swept the nation over this past weekend, and it involved audiences uniformly and venomously booing The Devil Inside as soon as the credits rolled on the found footage horror movie.  The film's mediocrity has now been well documented by audiences on Twitter, accompanied by almost unanimously terrible critical reviews and a rare "F" score collected by market research firm CinemaScore.  Being pretty much objectively a really, really crappy movie didn't stop The Devil Inside from making a fairly ridiculous amount of money in its debut weekend and easily topping the domestic box office.

2011 is in the bag and the bag is in the river, folks.  It was a year that saw ticket prices continuing to increase and attendance continuing to decline at multiplexes all over this nation of ours.  Overall, the year that was saw a decline of roughly 3% from the cumulative box office of 2010, the year in which Avatar rolled around in a money pile.  The last weekend of 2011 saw no new major releases, leaving the heavy hitters from last week's holiday onslaught to stay strong over New Year's weekend.  Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol once again stood atop box office mountain, with fellow sequels Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows and Alvin and the Chipmunks: Chipwrecked rounding out the top three.  Additionally, War Horse built momentum and New Year's Eve got a bump for obvious reasons.

With some notable exceptions, 2011 was not the most robust year at the American box office, and studio soothsayers are no doubt hunched over chicken livers, divining better fortunes for the impending year of 2012, packed as it is with much-anticipated blockbusters.  For the penultimate weekend of this odd-numbered year, though, multiplexes across the nation were packed with new releases, all dropped willy-nilly throughout the week, creating a strange brew of eclectic releases.  For the holiday weekend, Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol emerged as the big winner, with fellow sequel Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows in second place, and The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo getting all Swedish in third place, along with two Steven Spielberg joints down the line.

For a long, long time, the conventional wisdom regarding sequels was that they were inherently endeavors of diminishing returns, with each entry making less money than the one before.  Of course, these days juggernaut franchises have proven that to no longer be the case; the seven biggest movies of 2011 have all been sequels, starting with Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2 and down through Cars 2.  The two widest releases this weekend made a case that certain properties lead to franchise fatigue faster than others, as both Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows and Alvin and the Chipmunks: Chipwrecked, couldn't equal the debuts of their predecessors.  Still, the limited released of Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol could indicate that, after fifteen years, the Mission: Impossible franchise could still have some kick.

Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol is just a few days away from its release on IMAX screens, after which it will hit normal-sized theaters on December 21st.  As such, Paramount is saturating the market with Ghost Protocol promotion, including a brand new three-minute clip that consists exclusively of action, as Tom Cruise's Ethan Hunt pursues some random dude into a sandstorm sweeping through Dubai.  The whole thing is set to a score by Michael Giacchino that doesn't hold back on the bongo fury.

Bigness is a prerequisite for blockbuster status, and there ain't nothing bigger than IMAX.  A new poster exclusive to midnight IMAX screenings of Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol reminds us all that the biggest movie star on the planet will be a movie where he dangles from the side of the tallest building in the world as part of a sequence filmed with the IMAX cameras.  Like The Dark Knight, the latest entry in the Mission: Impossible series used the cameras for specifics shots and sequences so to provide a properly bombastic blockbuster.  If you see the film in the jumbo-sized format at midnight this week, you'll be able to pick up your own copy of this poster, which is designed by artist Matt Owen, in your choice of a red or black background.  Or you can just save this image of the black version to your desktop.

As the sequel's IMAX release is less than two weeks away, Paramount Pictures has released yet another new official clip from Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol.  Unlike past clips, this one doesn't feature Jeremy Renner jumping into a turbine, or two gorgeous women in an all-out fisticuffs, or even Tom Cruise swinging around on the Burj Khalifa.  Instead, it has Cruise and Simon Pegg engaging in a little humorous interplay without actually exchanging a word.  Pegg is doing all the talking as Benji Dunn, the talkative tech expert introduced in the last film, Mission: Impossible III, while Cruise's Ethan Hunt just threateningly pantomimes at him via a hacked security camera.  When Hunt finally holds up a fist, it's rendered all the more effective by the tight white tank top (or "wifebeater," as it's colloquially known) he's wearing.