BitterNews for Wednesday, March 10th, 2010

• Corey Haim is dead of an OD. Didn’t see that coming – oh, wait.
• Evan Rachel Wood has bolted the Spider-man musical. She was supposed to play Mary Jane, but now she’s playing Marilyn Manson’s jizz receptacle again. The product is now due to open in late summer / fall.
• The guy who attempted to extort Letterman copped today and got a six month sentence.
• 3A toys are announcing many more versions of WWR Dropcloth robot. No word on how they will be offered or where, but the crazy version with two meat cleavers sounds pretty awesome.
• The Tron Legacy trailer looks pretty hot.
• Mr Hurt Locker isn’t banging Jessica Simpson.
• Amazon has cancelled most of the GN orders that were placed this weekend. It appears the problem stemmed from Diamond. Almost all Diamond-distributed books are not for sale on Amazon right now, except for 3rd party sellers. So that’s more good news for financially troubled Steve Geppi.
• Sounds like Transformers 3 might show Cybertron!
• GI Joe: The Movie (the good cartoon, not the shitty live-action film) is coming back to DVD & now Blu-ray.
• Movie posters for The Losers and Kick-ass are showing up online.
• Rush Limbaugh said he’d move to Costa Rica if the US passes universal health care reform. Costa Rica, where they already have universal health care. Like every other country on earth. Except ours. But, by all means, go fat dude.
• Much hubbub about whether John Krasinski is still in running for role of Captain America, after Marvel leaked that he was their top choice.
• Rob Liefeld says he’ll travel to store that orders the most copies of Deadpool Corps #1. Better lower your orders!
• KISS has finally signed a deal for their long-promised TV show with E1, a Canadian Production co. No one knows the format, although Gene ha talked about an animated show for years. MMMMMmmmm… Canadian animation.
• Viggo Mortensen has taken over for Christoph Waltz in the new Cronenberg film, The Talking Cure.
• Diamond just shipped the Twilight manga a week ahead of street date, but hastily issued a request to retailers to not sell them in advance. That’ll happen – how many will be on eBay by end of day?
• If there are only 9 episodes of Lost left, they are going to need to pick up the pace if the ending is going to be satisfying.
• OK Go have left EMI after bitching that the label was trying to monetize their viral video plays. Good luck, marginally talented power pop one hit wonder! You’ll be eating microwave dinners in a year and working a day job in two. The State Fair circuit is only about ten years away.
• Pink Floyd is suing EMI for selling individual tracks online. According to the band, their contract stipulates that tracks must be sold in the album format (ie; bundled).
• In other swell music news, EMI must pay $160 million to Citibank by March 31st AND pass a solvency test (??) in order to keep Citibank from taking over the company. EMI is toast.
• Guns N Roses are filming their South American tour. It will probably never be released though.
• Creedence Clearwater Revival have found a film of them playing Royal Albert Hall 40 years ago – which they want to release on DVD. Due to their longoing issues with their old label, this may be unlikely – although the label has new owners who seem to have smoothed some issues.
• Sopranos creator David Chase is making a film about an upcoming 60’s rock band. I look forward to “That Thing You Do, But Not As Funny”.

BitterNews for Tuesday, January 26th, 2010

• After an unexciting Barb Wire reveal a few weeks back, Triad Toys has pics of their upcoming Ghost figure. The pic above does not do justice to the figure. Check out Triad’s page for more info.
• Tomorrow is tablet day. We suggest you check out the MacRumors website, which will provide consolidated coverage of the event as it takes place Wednesday, January 27th at 10 am Pacific, 1 pm Eastern.
• According to the NYTimes: “The tablet is expected to be a multimedia device that will let people watch movies and television shows, play games, surf the Internet and read electronic books and newspapers. Though companies like Toshiba Corp. and Hewlett-Packard Co. have introduced Windows-based tablet computers before and Amazon.com Inc. and others sell similarly-sized digital-book readers, people briefed by Apple say the company intends to carve out a new product category.”
• Apple are absolutely carving out their own distribution system, which will likely add books to the iTunes store, at a much higher return to publishers per sale than any other reader or system currently in place. Add this to the expected quality screen and the continuing Apple Mania, and if I was Kindle (or any other online delivery system), I’d be pooping my pants.
• Stop the planet - Keith Richards stopped drinking. If he quit, something must be drastically wrong (dead liver), but we at BG hope that isn’t the case.
• eBay is introducing a new selling tier structure that allows users to sign up for one year at $49.99 and have free access to their Seller's Assistant Pro (previously a $25 a month program) and lower insertion fees.
• Michael Monroe (ex-Hanoi Rocks) revealed the line-up for his new band, which includes former Hanoi Rocks bandmate Sami Yaffa (bass), as well as Ginger from The Wildhearts and from Danzig/Samhain, guitarist Todd Youth (fresh from a stint with Glen Campbell!). This band will play SXSW and they have already written a bunch of songs for a release this fall (meaning 2011 in rock n roll time).
• John Travolta is sending scientologists to Haiti. Jessica Simpson is sending shoes. Therefore Jessica Simpson= smarter than John Travolta.
• The IRON MAN 2 soundtrack is ALL AC/DC – not a cheap proposition, BTW. A video from the album debuted online today. It’s like Maximum Overdrive all over again, except the Green Goblin isn’t in it.
• Lego are going blind-box with a new line of minifigs sold in separate boxes. Price is expected to be in the $2-$4 range. So far, no licensed figs are shown.
• Lauren Hill (ex-Fugees) who has burned through millions of dollars and many years working on a follow-up to the Miseducation of Lauren Hill album of many years ago, sang in New Zealand this weekend. Sony execs still not expecting to see their return on investment any time soon.
• Mattycollector.com continues to be a clusterfuck. Today Digital River sent out notices to many customers, notifying them that their Club Eternia subscriptions had expired. These customers had so far only gotten the January figure in a 12 month subscription, so of course the internet broke. Matty issued this: “All customer service issues with order numbers have been gathered and are being reported to Digital River today. Facebook pages are proving to be too difficult to navigate b/c there are so many posts (pages are slowwwww to load and prone to crashing the farther back we go) so once the Fan Forums launch, we'll be gathering issues there. FOR NOW, PLEASE POST ISSUES TO THIS NOTE.”
• “Shortly thereafter they sent this: Regarding the emails you've been receiving advising that your subscriptions are cancelled, we just verified with Digital River that they are NOT CANCELLED.” Just another day at Mattel!
• The Who announced their Super Bowl set list. I’d think the NFL might be pissed about this – it’s sort of anti-climactic – like announcing the winner of the game.
• Mark Millar is doing another charity auction, this time to name the bad guy in his upcoming book, Nemesis.
• Apparently Elin is not going to Divorce Tiger. He must be one smooth-talking, check-writing motherfucker.
• DELUSION OF THE DAY: Here’s a quote from the guy who plays Ando on Heroes regarding their plummeting ratings: "I'm not worried about it all, because I think that it's very misperceived. We have a larger audience than ever, but they're completely scattered in so many different platforms. People are watching "Heroes" not only on television but mostly on the computer and on their iPods and phones. They're doing NetFlix, Amazon, Hulu, NBC, DVDs, you name it. It's amazing how fast technology has evolved even in the past four years. The way people are watching media has changed completely." Yes, Ando, there are more platforms than ever to not watch Heroes on.
• Actor Pernell Roberts died at age 81. He starred on 'Bonanza’ and 'Trapper John, M.D.'
• The ABBAWORLD theme park / Museum opened in London. Now you know where to take your mom.
• Reports are trickling in of DCUC Wave 12 showing up at Wal-mart. Strangely, the cases include Iron, Spectre, Eclipso, and Dr.Midnight, but not the figures that are already being sold through specialty retailers (Mary Marvel, etc). No word on a date for solid case sales through Matty.
• The Secret Wars series with Thor, Hawkeye, etc is being found regionally.
• And finally, the Fall/Winter Xeric Awards were announced. I’m sure I’ll never read any of them.