Update: I apologize, I haven't been online much due to the holidays. I realized that there was an erroneous data point for Andrew Stanton in 2009 that was never supposed to be there. I missed it when I initially looked over the graph, but it's been removed now.

As we've been reflecting on the last ten years, we've been asking ourselves whether any true "masters" of science fiction and urban fantasy have emerged, especially in film and television. It's certainly been a decade of highs and lows, of old masters who've begun to fade and bright new stars just cresting the horizon.

To that end, I've attempted to chart the relative "master levels" of various directors and television producers over the several years. This is an utterly unscientific chart; I looked at the projects these folks have had since 2000 and assigned each one a "master level." The number reflects my understanding of the projects acclaim, its ability to attract an audience (i.e. box office/Nielsen numbers), its awards, whether it succeeded in something unusual (such as a relatively popular foreign language film in the case of Guillermo del Toro's Pan's Labyrinth or Dr. Horrible's status as a breakthrough web film), and the nebulous sense that it add or subtracted from the individual's "geek cred." The numbers themselves are largely subjective and, of course, you should feel free to nitpick.

The greater purpose was to offer a watercolory sense of whether any "masters" have emerged from this crowd. Certainly, the last year has brought low some of the genres' promising potentials. Joss Whedon entered into the decade riding high on a Buffy/Angel cocktail. Though his name wasn't enough to overcome Fox's confusing treatment of Firefly, but the show's eventual cult popularity led to the Serenity feature film, and the Whedon brand helped make Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog an important moment for web-based content. Perhaps this all made Dollhouse — which has been, by turns, frustrating and brilliant — all the more disappointing, its impeding demise fairly readily accepted, even by Whedon's fanbase. Similarly, Ron Moore's Battlestar Galactica, despite being regarded by some readers as the most overrated scifi of the decade, was regarded by many as a turning point for smart, politically savvy space opera. But a rocky final season punctuated by finale filled with dei ex machinae left a lot of folks sour on the entire series. And the Wachowskis, while doing a solid (though Alan Moore-enraging) bit of cinema with V for Vendetta, never quite lived up to the promises of The Matrix.

But there have been plenty of masterful bright spots as well. Bryan Fuller gave us some beautiful urban fantasy with shows with Dead Like Me, Wonderfalls, and Pushing Daisies, even if many of his efforts (including the truly amazing The Amazing Screw-On Head) were prematurely axed, or shafted before ever getting off the ground. Guillermo del Toro brought us to great heights with Pan's Labyrinth, even if his other eye candy films didn't hit the same heights.

So have we seen any masters? Peter Jackson has certainly come close. Granted, The Lord of the Rings movies are high fantasy, but they showcased Jackson's ability to handle a difficult epic in a way that not only pleased JRR Tolkien's fans, but also won him mainstream accolades. And his remake of King Kong, which should have been automatically anathema, proved both profitable and well-reviewed. The Lovely Bones has been his blip, earning him his worst reviews in 20 years. But it's more likely that 2009 will be remembered as the year Jackson introduced the world to filmmaker Neill Blomkamp, demonstrating that he has a good eye for new talent and the Hollywood cache to bring that talent to light. It's not for nothing that he made this year's power list.

Another power list member, JJ Abrams, has also given us a good spate of fun and thoughtful science fiction. While he didn't give us the decade's best monster movie, he did manage to reboot the Star Trek franchise in a way that was respectful to what came before and drew in folks who never turned into the TV shows. Of course, we still have yet to see as Lost will end and whether Fringe will survive.

Chris Nolan is on the list of promising possibilities for eventual masterhood. Although Memento wasn't science fiction, it took a "what if" concept (here, what if a man searching for his wife's killer had no short term memory) and portrayed it in a thoughtful, suspenseful, and ultimately heartbreaking way. And he not only shot fresh blood into the corpse of the Batman franchise, he made it Oscar-worthy. And now he's continuing the science fiction thread with Inception.

And, of course, there's the question of whether James Cameron will prove the kind of science fiction as much as he claimed to be the king of the world. His foray into science fiction television, Dark Angel, never fared particularly well in the ratings; it was eventually canceled in favor of Firefly, and it never achieved the posthumous popularity of the later show. But perhaps Avatar is the reinforcement of his previous scifi successes, proof that he can still be relevant where other long-time directors have started to fade away. Hopefully, we won't have to wait another 12 years to see his next installment.

Personally, though, after seeing the delightful Monsters Inc. followed by the superb The Incredibles and WALL-E, I have my fingers crossed for Andrew Stanton and Pixar Studios. Here's hoping that John Carter of Mars is something phenomenal.

Still, singling out directors and producers as possible masters might be missing the point entirely, even when we're talking about movies and TV. Alan Moore might well be your science fiction master, not just because he has written so many fantastic books, but also because those books have captured the imagination of so many directors in the last several years — albeit with varying results. And in the coming years we'll see how comic book writer Brian K. Vaughan — who has been working on Lost as well as the Buffy Season Eight comics — translates to the big screen when Y: The Last Man, Ex Machina, and Runaways hit theaters.

So who, if anyone, do you see as your science fiction master? Someone from the list above? Perhaps Russell T. Davis for reviving and expanding Doctor Who? Or maybe writers like Jane Espenson, who have worked on so many of the shows we love? And, with filmmakers like Neill Blomkamp and Duncan Jones arriving on the scene, who might prove themselves master of the genre in the next ten years?

Graph by Steph Fox.

Here's a bonus chart, with more data:

This looks to be the same Prince of Persia trailer that AJ last week, with the two lines from Ben Kingsley, Jake Gyllenhaal leaping about and Gemma Arterton talking up a sandstorm about the Dagger of Time and its effects. Speaking of effects, they look spectacular, but any kids with a computer can make good special effects these days. The plot is what matters here, and we still have no idea how that's going to play out. Those of you who go to movies just to see men leaping, however, are sure to be pleased.

Thanks to Sl0th for pointing us towards the trailer!

Don't be concerned if he hands them back with his autograph on them, you'll just need to explain you were turning them in for disposal.

The infamous boxer/director Boll will be at Spudic's Movie Empire in Van Nuys, California for two hours on Nov. 7 to autograph stuff and talk about Postal the movie.

Just be warned, he will knock you down if you get in his face.

Uwe Boll Signing [Classic Games, About]

Ray discusses stunt work, his faithfulness to the character, and some of the other roles he's taken on in the past in this interview, but by far the most interesting bits come at the very beginning, as he does ADR work for Rugal Bernstein, the boss character and host of the King of Fighters tournament. Not the highest quality dialogue there, but the movie has Maggie Q as Mai Shiranui, so I'm going to watch it regardless. I just might pause a bit more than usual.

300's Gerard Butler plays Kable, a wrongly-convicted felon who has been injected with a substance that essentially gives his brain an IP address that can be accessed by a player who controls him as he participates in the deadliest first-person shooter ever. Dexter's Michael C. Hall plays an eccentric internet gajillionaire game mogul named Ken Castle, who developed the technology to allow the human brain to be accessed by outside sources. The whole thing is the brainchild of Mark Neveldine and Brian Taylor of Crank fame.

We don't normally Frankenreview films here at Kotaku, but with the heavy emphasis (and some would say criticism) on gaming in Gamer, we just couldn't resist. One thing we've learned - movie critics can be quite brutal.

New York Daily News
This year's hot sci-fi concept - putting one person's consciousness in another body - is really getting a workout. Earlier this year there was the Mexican film "Sleep Dealer," and coming up is the Bruce Willis actioner "Surrogates," and of course the Big Kahuna, James Cameron's "Avatar." For right now, though, there's "Gamer," which pushes its way to the front of the line like a gorilla with a chainsaw.

Entertainment Weekly
In the fractious future of Gamer, videogames have ''gone human,'' with real live blood-sport warriors controlled by geeks with joysticks. The sickest of these games is Slayers, in which death-row inmates kill each other off in a noisy orgy of skip-stutter editing and dirty-ash-spattered explosions. It's The Dirty Dozen meets TRON, updated for the age of action incoherence. As the brutish Kable, Gerard Butler must find out who's pulling his strings, but it's the audience whose chain gets yanked by this headache-inducing techno-violent mishmash.

Los Angeles Times
It's a deeply cynical and joyless point of view, completely lacking in the winking visual style that made "Crank" worth a look. The one touch of wit — Hall lip-syncing and dancing to Sammy Davis Jr.'s rendition of "I've Got You Under My Skin" before going ballistic on Butler — is quickly enveloped by an ending that could generously be described as perfunctory. Rarely have the words "game over" come as such sweet relief.

The Onion AV Club
Eventually, Gamer just goes off the rails-or rather, onto very familiar rails. A dance number set to Sammy Davis Jr.'s version of "I've Got You Under My Skin" offers a glimmer of hope that old action-movie clichés won't triumph, but they eventually prove too powerful. A dastardly villain with dubious/stupid motivation battles a wrongly convicted family man whom he could have killed a hundred times during the movie with the touch of a button. Based on what comes before it-queasily ingratiating action sequences, a couple of really smart jabs at the media-it's clear that Neveldine and Taylor could have come up with something deeper, darker, and better for their third act. Instead, they lean on the easy cheat codes of conventionality, somehow forgetting they're better at exploding them.

LA Weekly
Neveldine and Taylor's spazzy (but coherent) action scenes rely mostly on blood spurts instead of feats of badassery, but their dystopia is inventive and their visual schemes diverse: The fight scenes play like a buffering online video, with the transmission glitches warping our sense of time, while Castle's home looks like a live-action Speed Racer, with Hall munching snacks against bizarre nature imagery in disorienting tableaux. Their sense of the grotesque can overshadow their targets - close-ups of a 500-pound guy to indict lazy media consumers isn't exactly subtle, and more of a distraction - but they're as smart about the details as they are loyal to corporation-bashing.

IO9
Gamer is intensely conflicted about the pleasures afforded by gaming. And in the end it's that conflict that makes this movie such a winningly demented satire. The bad guys, covered in gore, sing little songs about how they're about to frag the good guys. A warehouse full of blanged-out ravers from Society get soaked in day-glo viscera when Castle's goons attack. Even Castle has an incredible zombie dance number, surrounded by his mind-controlled videogame-slurping minions, who follow his every little shufflestep because he's beaming his moves straight to their Nanex.

Kotaku
Gamer isn't nearly as bad as you'd expect, but it's not nearly as good as it should be. Instead, the film is lost in that grey area between egregious mishandling and untapped potential. I wouldn't suggest going to the movies to see it, but it's probably worth a view once it comes to the small screen if for no other reason than to wonder at the possibilities of what could have been.

And this is why we can't have nice things.

Looks like LEGO isn't the only toy line getting a piece of the Prince next year, with McFarlane Toys getting ready to roll out an army of PoP figures in May 2010, when the major motion picture hits theaters. Fans will be able to choose between 4 inch shirtless Jakes, 6 inch deluxe shirtless Jakes, deluxe shirtless horse box sets, a movie play set, or a replica plastic Dagger of Time, perfect for rewinding your more heinous mistakes, such as when you use the word shirtless so much it becomes uncomfortable.

Check out the full line up listing below, and prepare to be merchandised at.

STANDARD ACTION FIGURES (4-inch)

(Approximate Retail Price $7.99; Available May 2010)

With more than 12 points of articulation and character specific accessories, kids will have hours of fun recreating and playing out their favorite movie scenes. All figures fit with horse boxed sets and play sets (sold separately). The line includes two figures of Prince Dastan, a Warrior Dastan and a Desert Dastan, Zolm (Lead Hassansin), Ghazab (Double Bladed Halberd Hassansin) and Setam (Human Porcupine Hassansin)

DELUXE ACTION FIGURES (6-inch)

(Approximate retail price $9.99; Available May 2010)

Bringing to life the movie heroes and villains in this line, each figure is fully articulated and includes incredible costuming details and spring-loaded play action highlighting their unique weapons and accessories from the feature film. The 6-inch action figure line includes: two figure of Prince Dastan, a Warrior Dastan and a Desert Dastan, Zolm (Lead Hassansin), Ghazab (Double Bladed Halberd Hassansin)

HORSE BOXED SETS

(Approximate Retail Price $14.99; Available May 2010)

Your imagination leads the way for recreating favorite scenes with the 4-inch Horse Boxed Sets. Engage in battle with the adventurous Prince Dastan and his archenemies, the Hassansins. Each boxed sets includes a highly detailed battle horse with ornate exotic accessories and 4-inch articulated movie figure. Boxed Set line includes two sets: Prince Dastan with Aksh and Zolm (Lead Hassansin) with Akvan

MOVIE PLAY SET

(Approximate Retail Price $19.99; Available May 2010)

Bring home the fantastical world of "Prince of Persia: Sands of Time" with McFarlane Toys highly detailed Alamut Gate Play Set. The set depicts a key action sequence from the feature film and contains unique play action features including a spring loaded rock launcher, secret compartments, hidden traps, slides and working cranks. The Alamut Gate play set includes a 4-inch action figure.

THE DAGGER OF TIME COLLECTIBLE

(Approximate Retail Price $9.99; Available May 2010)

The Dagger of Time is a powerful weapon, capable of allowing its owner to harness the power of the Sands of Time, and manipulate time itself. Your mission is to safeguard the ancient dagger capable of releasing the Sands of Time. Designed to appeal to collectors, the 10-inch Dagger of Time is sculpted in the exact size and ornate likeness of the movie weapon and features a jeweled handle that lights-up with a high power L.E.D., disappearing sand and soft vinyl blade.

Bryan Lee O'Malley's Scott Pilgrim is a digest-sized comic series from Oni Press that follows the tale of Canadian slacker bassist Scott Pilgrim. Scott has met the girl of his dreams, but in order to keep her he must defeat her seven evil ex-boyfriends. If the plot sounds familiar, you are a male who has dated. Michael Cera and Mary Elizabeth Winstead are starring in the film adaptation, directed by Edgar Wright of Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz Fame. Ubisoft Montreal is developing and publishing the video game adaptation Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World, due out in 2010, just in time for the film's release.

"We're excited to work with Universal to create a video game experience based on the Scott Pilgrim universe," said Christian Salomon, vice president of Worldwide Licensing at Ubisoft. "Scott Pilgrim is a special property, one that is both nostalgic and completely original. The game will provide a fun and unique experience to players and combine all the important elements seen in the film-action, romance, irreverent pop culture references and rock-n-roll."

The release didn't say anything specifically about platforms, or whether they would be adapting the comic art style or going for something more live-action movie related, but I'm sure that information will come to light in due time.

And yes, this was announced at Comic-Con, but we were busy being exhausted.

During the Dante's Inferno panel earlier today at the San Diego Comic-Con, director Vic Cook explained just how deep Dante would travel in the animated feature.

"You're gonna love it. We've got bodies flying around. We've got Dante literally being shoved up a monster's butt."

Um...what?

Perhaps I just heard that wrong. I figured they would take extensive liberties with the original work, but there's no way they would get that extensive, would they? Let's see what the game's executive producer, Jonathan Knight has to say.

"In the original game script we wrote that Cerberus was going to shove Dante up his ass...it was a crazy, crazy scene. We just couldn't do it in the game for a lot of reasons. To have that moment that was in the game script that was cut from the game to show up in the animated feature is just really cool."

...okay then. Might want to keep that in mind when you see the Dante's Inferno DVD on shelves sometime in 2010...you know...if you're into that sort of thing.

Aside from the monster anal, Cook also hinted at a scene set in the Lust level, directed by anime director Dong Woo, that was absolutely mind-blowing, over the top..."I can't even talk about it because there are children here." So don't worry about spoilers. The worst is yet to come!

The Oscar winner plays bad dude Nizam. Just look at that hard nose stare. That twinkle in his eye is so scary.

Prince of Persia - Character Poster Debut - [UGO]

We're going to start shooting at the end of the year.

It's hard to hear exactly what Jovovich was asked to prompt that response. (Though the minute of footage of her droning on and on about her child? We can here that just fine.)

A paprazzi follows up Jovovich's reply by asking, "Which one is this?" Gesturing, Jovovich said, "Four."

One insider reports that Jovovich confirmed to him directly that she has signed on to do Resident Evil: Afterlife and filming will start at the end of the year.

Jovovich: Resident Evil 4 Shooting By End of '09 [ShockTillYouDrop]

Antichrist, starring Willem Defoe and Charlotte Gainsbourg, is a horror film set in cabin in the woods. The film's outting at Cannes not only earned it a special "anti award" but resulted in four people faniting during the preview because of the extreme violence.

Turning a movie that opens with a child dying and includes genital mutilation is, you can imagine, a challenge.

""[The movie] goes against all the conventions of how you make games and what you can do in games," Game director Morten Iverson told MTV's Russ Frushtick ." Dead kids, nudity, graphic violence. It will be a very controversial game, and it'll be a game that doesn't really compare with anything else."

The game will be available for download only, hopefully on Xbox Live and Steam, Iverson said. The team also hopes to incorporate a person's personal fears into the games presentation by having gamers create a profile with a list of what they fear most to use in the game.

Hit up the full interview for the rest of this strange story.

‘Antichrist' Game Director: ‘Absolutely Not Available In Wal-Mart!'

While the Xbox 360 is getting Watchmen: The End is Nigh Parts 1 and 2 as a standalone retail release, the PlayStation 3 is getting a much more enticing release. The two-disc set combines the director's cut of the Watchmen film with both parts of the downloadable game, with exclusive artwork thrown in for good measure. The director's cut of the movie contains 25 minutes of footage not seen in theaters, but still no giant squid.

The releases will coincide with standard DVD release on July 21st, with The End is Nigh Part 2 also available as a standalone download on Xbox Live Arcade and the PlayStation Network.

The cast from the original game makes the transition to the sequel intact, which means that the original voice of Megatron, Frank Welker, will again be stepping into the Decepticon leader's giant metal shoes in place of the film's Hugo "I smell you, boy!" Weaving. We've got Megan Fox as eye candy, Optimus "Peter Cullen" Prime as Optimus Prime, and the rest of the movie bot lineup. In addition, newcomer John Di Maggio joins the cast as Bender Sideways, and James Arnold Taylor takes up the role of The Fallen. Oh, and Shia LaBeouf is in there too. I think he plays Sam Witwicky's little yappy dog.

On a side note, doing a Google image search for Megan Fox is the absolute best way to start your day.

Regardless of how great/terrible the movie ends up, it's nice seeing somebody go to the trouble of building a ginormous, real set. Just a shame that kind of budgetary excess couldn't extend to putting some clothes on Jake Gyllenhaal.

[via Seanbajuice]

Tonight my wife and I are going out for a rare Tristan-free movie night. The question is, should I be taking her to see the Watchmen or is it going to leave her feeling bored and me feeling inadequate?

I've never been one of those people unable to get past the source material for a movie and enjoy the theatrical experience, but I still can't imagine Watchmen is going to live up to my expectations. Are you going to see it, or did you already?

Did it live up to yours?

On July 31, 1928, the paper announced they would be using a three-star reviewing system from then on out to rate movies. And almost from the same day, movie critics starting hating the system.

It took video game writers a bit longer to adopt the ubiquitous system for rating games, but the hatred was right on it's heels.

Recently game reviews and the use of ratings have become a target of constant navel staring, with critics, writers and box-standers killing obscene amounts of pixels to talk about what should be done. Last year, we just threw ratings out the window, reinventing how we reviewed games.

I don't expect the same sort of reaction from movie critics, but at least they're starting to talk about their hatred of the system.

"We don't seek to reduce our arguments about a particular piece of art to a number, or letter grade, or golden spatulas, or whatever," says Sam Sifton, the New York Times' culture editor told the Wall Street Journal for a recent article on the subject. "These are numbers that aren't based on any rational or countable thing." However, restaurant reviews in the paper have long included rankings from "poor" to four stars. Mr. Sifton, the former dining editor, calls those "the exception that proves the rule here."

The article is a fascinating read for anyone interested in the subject. It talks about the history of reductive criticism, the good and bad, and how sites like Metacritic have helped bring the issue to a head.

One critic's pan of "Pearl Harbor" originally was ranked 40 out of 100, until he contacted the site to say it was more like a 10. Marc Doyle, co-founder and senior product manager of Metacritic, which is now owned by CBS, says the site's employees read reviews carefully, will change scores if they are protested by reviewers, and will reconsider them if readers object. "It's just a tool, like any other tool," he says of the site.

Doyle, for his part, says that Metacritic is exploring improvements.

Let's Rate the Ranking Systems of Film Reviews [Wall Street Journal]

[ComingSoon]

After Crecente posted the news of Verbinski's purchase of the rights to the 2007 Wall Street Journal article about a man cheating on his wife in Second Life, I hopped onto the virtual world in order to ask Ric Hoogestraat's avatar Dutch what he thought about his situation possibly turning into a film. Not surprisingly, he hadn't heard anything about it.

The story belongs to the Wall Street Journal now, so it wasn't necessary for either the paper or Verbinski to get in touch with Hoogestraat whatsoever. Pity though. His avatar has an extremely kick-ass pirate-themed sim in SL that I'm sure the Pirates of the Caribbean director would just love.

While trying to contact Dutch, I got a pretty good idea of what had happened since the original article ran back in 2007.

According to his profile in Second Life, he now lives in Arizona with the player of the avatar he was cheating on his wife with, having married her in December of last year, several months after the article ran in which he repeatedly assured his wife that it was just role-playing. I guess that whole bit had changed.

Just a tip here folks. If your spouse is married on Second Life, they are cheating on you. You generally do not get partnered in SL for fun. If it comes to that, there is something seriously wrong with your relationship.

Don't worry about Ric and his new wife, however. Apparently the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation is doing a documentary on the couple, which looks to be so in-depth that he didn't feel the need to follow up with me on the story.

I think the CBC documentary - if they dont fuck us over - will be the only follow-up we need to do

Here's hoping the loving couple stays un-fucked.

“Legendary Pictures is currently trying to assign some names to write the screenplay and find someone to direct it, so it’s still really early in production,” Pearce said. “They want to make sure they get the right talent for those different parts, especially the screenwriting, because that’s the foundation for the movie.”

You hear that, fanfic writers? Just run your creations through a spell check, trim about 90% of the Blood / Night Elf sex scenes out, and you could have yourself a movie script. Dare to dream!

Internal Blizzard Team Won’t Be Making CGI For ‘World of Warcraft’ Movie [MTV Multiplayer]