Disney loves remaking its features, especially those starring people who have gone on to bigger and better things like Kurt Russell and Jodie Foster. We've seen La Lohan redos of the aptly titled triumvirate of Freaky Friday, Fully Loaded and The Parent Trap. They've done live action versions of 101 Dalmatians with Glenn Close complicit in Cruella De Vil's plot to boil puppies the way she did Michael Douglas' rabbit. (How else was she going to get their fur off?) Robin Williams bounced around with Flubber and The Shaggy Dog starred Santa Clause cash cow Tim Allen. Since they're so used to going back to the well, I've got a few predictions for what films Disney will do next:

Old Yeller 2008: Old Yeller is now made of CGI and has facial and body expressions generated by Daniel Day-Lewis with sensors all over his body. Day-Lewis will spend 3 months in a cage at the ASPCA to get the feel for what being a dog is like, and will demand a doghouse and a fire hydrant instead of a trailer on the set. Since it's 2008 and kids today are wussies, Old Yeller doesn't wind up on the business end of a gun. Instead, he saves his young boy hero from a well. The makers of Lassie settle out of court.

Darby O'Gill And the Vertically Challenged People: Sean Connery will come out of retirement to remake the movie he wishes he could forget he made, Darby O'Gill and the Little People. Connery's role in the original is now played by Ewan McGregor, so Connery will be digitally shrunk to play one of the vertically challenged folks. This musical reunites McGregor with Nicole Kidman, his costar in Moulin Rouge. Songs by Randy Newman and Sinead O'Connor.

Rap of the South: They'll never drag Song of the South out of the Disney vault, but that doesn't mean they can't do a politically correct version of it to capitalize on the current rap craze. The first R-rated movie under the Walt Disney Pictures banner stars Southern rap stars Andre 3000, Master P, and Li'l John in the tale of a wise old storyteller (Samuel L. Jackson) who teaches the young men in his charge how to be better fathers and sons through the magic of rap. Pixar will do the computer animations and "Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah" will be remixed by Kanye West.

I can't wait.

Fanboys rejoice! Sir Ian McKellan (that's Magneto to you) is reprising his role as Gandalf in Guillermo Del Toro's Hobbit Part One and Hobbit Part Deux. Reuters quotes McKellan as saying " I spoke to Guillermo in the very room that Peter Jackson offered me the part and he confirmed that I would be reprising the role. Obviously, it's not a part that you turn down, I loved playing Gandalf." If memory serves me correctly, McKellan's Gandalf, Ian Holm's Bilbo Baggins and Andy Serkis' CGI Gollum characters are the only ones that overlap with the Lord of the Rings. This means those of you waiting for that super hot liquor-filled love scene between Samwise and Frodo will have to instead scour the Internet for that fanboy fiction that turns Mount Doom into Brokeback Mountain. Those Hobbits, they know how to par-tay!

Hopefully, del Toro will do a better job than Rankin and Bass with the material. Their animated Hobbit, which far too many of my schoolmates watched in lieu of reading the assigned book, isn't exactly terrible. It's what you'd expect from the guys who gave us a Baby New Year whose big ears rival Will Smith's and Barack Obama's. But if del Toro is so dedicated that he's moving to New Zealand for four years to work on the films with producer Peter Jackson, one can hope that level of dedication equals quality filmmaking. We'll know in 2010 when the first film comes out.

Speaking of which, why are there two movies in the first place? The Hobbit isn't that big a book, and its story doesn't seem equipped to be spread over two films. Is this greed on the part of the filmmakers? Perhaps New Line can do a cross-pollination of Warner Bros. franchises, and reveal in the two part film version of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows that Gandalf and Dumbledore knew each other in the Biblical sense. I'm being facetious and silly, but I really do mean the next line you're about to read. If they don't include Leonard Nimoy's horrific "The Ballad of Bilbo Baggins" on the Hobbit soundtrack, I ain't going to see it.

I believe that everything in life has a pattern to it, which would explain why every time Mariah Carey shows up in a movie or TV show, her character has a stripper name. A stripper name is a name that either sounds like a double entendre, is alliterative, or is a regular named spelled in some garish fashion. Most of Carey's roles cover one or both scenarios. In Glitter, she was Billie Frank, which sounds like an adult film star (admittedly a male one, but whatever). On Ally McBeal, she was Candy Cushnip. The film WiseGirls casts her as Raychel, adding the "y" to Rachel as a subtle way of asking "Y is she in this movie?" After changing up for the sequel to State Property, playing the descriptively named Professionally Dressed Woman, Carey is right back to her old tricks. In her latest film, Tennessee, she plays Krystal. I bet the actors' accents make her name sound like Cristal.

What's old is new again; especially in Hollywood. According to The Hollywood Reporter, the 1975 Disney supernatural kid flick Escape to Witch Mountain is going to be re-re-imagined (it was previously re-imagined as a made-for-TV movie in 1995) as the adventure Race to Witch Mountain.

It seems I'm fast becoming the Movies Without Pity guy who picks on Tom Cruise. If he'd stay out of the news for five seconds, it would lessen my temptation. By itself, the 25th anniversary of Risky Business is a tame news story. Couple it with Cruise's return to The Oprah Winfrey Show, however, and you've changed the dynamics. Everyone will recall Cruise's last appearance on Oprah, where he went cuckoo for Katie Puffs and turned Oprah's couch into a trampoline. Miss Sofia is hoping you'll remember too; the ads for her two part series on Cruise play like mini-Hitchcock trailers. "Will he go bonkers again?" they imply. The ads have Oprah asking Cruise questions about his behavior, both on her show and on the Today show, and each time they cut to Cruise looking like he's itching to go bouncing across the room like the early versions of Daffy Duck:

Being the current lust object of decrepitly old directors like Woody Allen and Brian DePalma isn't enough for Scarlett Johansson. America's fakest femme fatale (see Match Point and The Black Dahlia if you think I am in jest) has now decided she wants to sing. Perhaps this decade's Diane Keaton took a cue from Woody's Everyone Says I Love You, a musical he cast with actors so tone deaf the THX speakers shut down in protest. Whatever the excuse, the star of the Woodman's upcoming Vicky Cristina Barcelona has become the latest actor to try burning up the Billboard charts. I bet William Shatner is laughing on the set of Boston Legal right now.

Amy Winehouse may have said "no, no, no" to rehab (until recently, anyway), but she's saying "yes, yes, yes" to a song for the next James Bond movie, Quantum of Solace. The Guardian is reporting that Winehouse is "working on the theme song" with Mark Ronson, who also produced her Back to Black album.

Variety reports that Mel Gibson is set to star in Edge of Darkness, a feature film adaptation of a 1985 BBC miniseries. Also noted is that this will be Gibson's first starring role since 2002's Signs and We Were Soldiers. Perhaps Gibson's been too busy writing and directing his own films, or taking long drives to give much thought to headlining a film until now.

The fossil record is littered with examples of what a long, slow process evolution usually is: Around forty million years ago, wolf-sized whales were scampering around Pakistan on their furry little legs. For the reptilian Sleestaks from Land of the Lost, however, it took just over thirty years to evolve from guys in truly horrible rubber suits to...guys in slightly less horrible rubber suits.

Vulture asks, "Where Are the Roles for Superwomen?" and I'd be lying if I didn't say I've been wondering the same thing.

Remember the Wonder Woman movie that was being written by Joss Whedon? I'm sure you at least remember when it fell apart. If you're curious what happened to that movie after Whedon's departure, it is still on. The script as it's currently being worked will be an "origin story," written by two men. Which is a change for the worse. I know Whedon is a man, but if a man has to write Wonder Woman, it would be better -- at least as far as feminism and girl power are concerned -- if it were helmed by the guy who created Buffy rather than Brent Strickland and Matthew Jennison, neither of whom have written a screenplay before. But I'll try to withhold judgment.