I think the Casting Gods are teasing me. First off, there's a rumor going around that Clint Eastwood might just sign on to play the mayor of Gotham City in the next Batman movie. And secondly, reports have surfaced that Nicolas Cage got cast in a movie that otherwise sounded like it would have been perfectly good. The two tidbits are such polar extremes they threaten to cancel each other out. My Nicolas Cage gag reflex hit me at about the same time as my Clint Eastwood WHOO! reflex, and I had to lie down for a second.

Some of you may be familiar with the old trivia that the Mayan calendar ends in the year 2012 (on December 12th, to be exact) and that many predict the world's end will come with it. It's not a new theory -- scientists have been studying it since the beginning of the last century -- so it 's a bit of a surprise that it's taken this long for someone to make an apocalyptic movie based on the premise. Roland Emmerich, the director behind the tragically bad 10,000 BC is in preproduction on, wait for it... 2012.

...or 39 of them. Spielberg's DreamWorks has acquired the rights to The 39 Clues, what Variety describes as "a multiplatform adventure series." As yet The 39 Clues is a 10-book series, the first of which, The Maze of Bones, will be released on September 9th of this year by Scholastic. The "multiplatform" part seems to include a set of collectible cards, an online game where young readers can try to solve a mystery for a $10,000 grand prize, and obviously, the Spielberg flick. Which, according to DreamWorks' co-chair, may not be the only one coming to the big screen. "There is enough material here for three or four movies," Stacey Snider told Variety, adding, "Steven is very involved and passionate. This excites me as an executive but also as a mother. It is an educational, challenging interactive experience that hits kids where they live." Ouch.

You may recall several months ago when we at The Moviefile reported on the upcoming X-Files film and noted that writer/director Chris Carter was keeping plot details from the film so tight that crew members were only allowed to read the script in a video-monitored room. Now Carter seems to be delving even deeper into life as a secret squirrel: he's keeping the fact that he's directing a new film entirely under wraps. The Hollywood Reporter broke the story today that Carter is already halfway through directing Fencewalker, a dark drama starring Natalie Dormer, Katie Cassidy (David Cassidy's daughter!) and Xzibit. The film, currently shooting in L.A., is rumored to be a coming-of-age, semi-autobiographical (the longest word I've typed in five years) character piece. THR also points out that the film has no supernatural elements, unless you count the director's paranoia. What it is he has to be paranoid about, I'm not sure.

Everyone knows that uglifying yourself for a movie role is pretty much a guaranteed one way ticket to Academy Award-ville (Nicole Kidman in The Hours, Charlize Theron in Monster, George Clooney in Syriana) or at the very least a butt-load of critical acclaim (Renee Zellweger in Bridget Jones' Diary). Now it seems I'm Fucking Matt Damon is taking a page from the busted actors hand-book for a turn in the forthcoming Steven Soderbergh film The Informant. Peep that pot-belly and ruddy, sunburnt complexion! Why he looks the spitting image of my fifth grade English teacher!

You're going to hear this a lot between now and March 6th, 2009, when the movie comes out (mostly right here), but Watchmen is a really good comic book. How good? So good that it has commercials in it, and you actually want to read them. Okay, so they're fake ads for various fictional products put out by the World's Smartest Man, Ozymandias (left), a former member of the superteam the Minutemen, but that's beside the point.

No, that's not a joke. The actress who has recently played such diverse roles as a nymphomaniac, a werewolf and a pig-faced girl is the first person to sign up for The Hero of Color City, a CGI animated movie about crayons who band together to protect their world from a color-draining tyrant. Well, it doesn't sound any stranger than VeggieTales.

Finally, another reason to go to Amsterdam! You know, besides the culture. Cinema Expo is happening this week in the Dutch city of sin, and the studios are unraveling their 2008-2009 slates for an international crowd. Here's what's been lighting up the message boards:

Sylvester Stallone and Arnold Schwarzenegger are embarking on an unusual adventure--one that leads them to Bollywood and to their first movie together. The veteran action stars don't even have to leave home to do it, because India is coming to them, according to The Guardian. The two have signed on to appear in Kambakkht Ishq, which translates to "Incredible Love." No, it's not a rom-com celebrating the California Supreme Court's recent ruling on same-sex marriage. The big-budget (£11m) production is the story of an Indian stuntman who moves to L.A. and "has to juggle the demands of avoiding on-rushing freight trains with finding love in the Californian metropolis." The on-rushing trains sound exponentially less daunting.

Haters who think there are too many superhero movies out there can add one more to their hit list. That, or they may want to change how they think about superheroes, because Wanted is definitely worth seeing, whether you're a closet Smallville fan or not.