Philly­Film­Girl is back with her next video; this time the dis­cus­sion revolves around whether or not a pole is a place­holder for a robot dur­ing prepa­ra­tion for a night­time ally shoot in what will be Paris:

A reli­able source that has proved cor­rect in the past has pro­vided some infor­ma­tion con­cern­ing the G1 com­biner Dev­as­ta­tor robot to TFW2005:

Dev­as­ta­tor details

- Seven con­struc­tion vehi­cles merge to form Dev­as­ta­tor
– Dev­as­ta­tor has lots of upper body strength, like a gorilla
– Not just green, some of the vehi­cles are red and yel­low
– The pre­vi­ously Long Haul con­cept art by Josh Nizzi is legit

Quite frankly, some­thing of this size and com­plex­ity would be both awe­some and epic.

TLAMB raise some very valid points which put this news into doubt, and why I can­not report this as a con­fir­ma­tion. Specif­i­cally — we have not seen any con­struc­tion vehi­cles dur­ing film­ing, a toy that is cre­ated from more than 5 parts presents a dif­fi­cult engi­neer­ing task for Has­bro — some­thing that will be more expen­sive “than the $25 sweet point”. They also stip­u­late that given Prime’s height of 35 feet, the size of an aver­age con­struc­tion vehi­cle, this robot could reach up to 80 feet in height.

The Josh Nizzi Concept

… then removed at the request of para­mount pictures.

Mem­bers on TFW2005 were treated to sev­eral blurry and small images which revealed the designs of both alt­mode and robot mode of the Chevy Trax, Corvette Cen­ten­nial and Audi R8.

Raimi and Maguire Return

This is the BIG news we’ve all been wait­ing and hop­ing for. Both main star Tobey Maguire and direc­tor Sam Raimi have been locked in to Spider-man 4! This report comes from the reli­able scoop web­site Nikki Finke’s Dead­line Hol­ly­wood Daily. There is not yet a deal for Kirsten Dunst to return as Mary Jane Watson.

Prin­ci­pal Pho­tog­ra­phy & Main Villain

Prin­ci­pal pho­tog­ra­phy is set to begin in the fall of 2009 to tar­get a May 2011 release. The long gap until that date affords time to recruit a main vil­lain; with spec­u­la­tion strongly sug­gest­ing Dr. Curt Connors/The Lizard. The Sin­is­ter Six have also been men­tioned. Vil­lain rumors for Spider-man 4.

Spider-man 4 and Spider-man 5 together

The report also states, as pre­vi­ously rumored, that they are look­ing for angles at pro­duc­ing the next two sequels at the same time because of its cost effec­tive­ness and the dif­fi­culty in keep­ing every­one together.

Venom Movie

And Sony has hired a pair of screen­writ­ers to get going on the Spider-Man 3 spin­off movie Venom. Given that comic book artist/writer and action fig­ure maker, Todd McFar­lane, who is one of the cre­ators of the Mar­vel vil­lain, doesn’t think a Venom movie could do well with a vil­lain as the cen­tral char­ac­ter, my sources think Sony should let Topher Grace, even though he was blown up at the end of Spider-Man 3 (yet a por­tion of the Venom cos­tume sur­vived), stay in the role because the like­able actor could be a a sym­pa­thetic evildoer.

Thanks Robin!

Wow — this is a very excit­ing char­ity auc­tion that is cur­rently being bid on over at Ebay. End­ing on Sep­tem­ber 15th and already sit­ting at $5600, this is a once in a life­time oppor­tu­nity to have a slice of the Iron Man 2 pie (expe­ri­ence). The pro­ceeds will go to “Stand up to Cancer”.

View the auction

A visit to the set of Iron Man 2 (one shoot­ing day)
A meet and greet with the cast
A walk-on/ extra role in the film for the auc­tion win­ner
Photo tour of the set with an Iron Man unit pho­tog­ra­pher to doc­u­ment the tour. Pro­fes­sional pho­tos will be given to the win­ner of the expe­ri­ence.
Tick­ets to the Los Ange­les pre­mière for you and a guest
Win­ner and Guest will walk the première’s red carpet

About Stand up to Can­cer:

Stand Up To Can­cer, forg­ing a new way to develop break­throughs that will end can­cer is putting together the best and bright­est minds in can­cer research, invest­ing in their projects and tak­ing the bureau­cratic obsta­cles out of their way. We’re build­ing inter­dis­ci­pli­nary Dream Teams of sci­en­tists, clin­i­cians, tech­ni­cians and oth­ers, who’ll focus on a spe­cific can­cer prob­lem. We’ll track their progress in real time, so that all who invests can see how their par­tic­i­pa­tion is cre­at­ing real change.

At an spe­cial screen­ing of Iron Man and a live com­men­tary by direc­tor Jon Favreau and Downey Jr., cov­ered by Film­Crunch, a num­ber of sequel and Avengers hints were pointed out:

Through­out the movie, the actor-turned-director pointed out and con­firmed var­i­ous scenes which hinted at both The Avengers movie (vis­i­ble S.H.I.E.L.D. logos) and the sequel (he noted that the ter­ror­ist cell in the movie is merely one branch of Mandarin’s group).

Downey served to be more enter­tain­ing dur­ing the com­men­tary than his char­ac­ter in Iron Man, which I didn’t think was possible.

With the DVD release and the var­i­ous on disc com­men­taries, we can look for­ward to more details about the forth­com­ing sequel.

We posted these rumors a short while back (along with a Jolie Cat­woman one), but now some news of this cast­ing has come from the lips of Michael Caine in speak­ing with MTV:

“They’ve already got them in mind,” said Caine, when asked who he’d like to see take up arms against the Caped Cru­sader. “It’s Johnny Depp as The Rid­dler. And The Pen­guin is Philip Sey­mour Hoff­man. I read it in the paper.”

So Caine is like the rest of us, read­ing gos­sip in the tabloids, right? Except for one thing…according to the actor, he con­firmed the news through the stu­dio itself.

“When Christo­pher [Nolan] said we were going to do ‘The Dark Knight’ next, I didn’t what that meant in Bat­man terms,” related Caine, who plays Bruce Wayne’s loyal but­ler, Alfred Pen­ny­worth. “I said, ‘What’s the story?’ and he said The Joker. I said, ‘Oh, s–t! How are you going to top Jack [Nichol­son]?’ He said, ‘Well, I’ve cast Heath Ledger. And I went ‘Ha! I couldn’t top Jack, but if any­one could, maybe Heath could.’ And he did.

“I was with [a Warner Bros.] exec­u­tive and I said, ‘Are we going to make another one?’ They said yeah. I said, ‘How the hell are we going to top Heath? And he says ‘I’ll tell you how you top Heath — Johnny Depp as The Rid­dler and Philip Sey­mour Hoff­man as The Pen­guin.’ I said, ‘S–t, they’ve done it again!’” [Laughs]

No doubt there will be some offi­cial clar­i­fi­ca­tion of this announce­ment in the com­ing days, how­ever what is inter­est­ing is the clear inten­tion for The Pen­guin and The Rid­dler to star in the third movie, whether Depp or Hoff­man sign on is another mat­ter — and one that I still don’t see being con­firmed for a long while yet.

How do you feel about The Rid­dler and Pen­guin poten­tially appear­ing in Bat­man 3?

The next rumored stop for the Trans­form­ers 2 film­ing crew is the Hol­lo­man Air Force Base and White Sands Mis­sile Range in Alam­ogordo, New Mex­ico. These rumors have been rein­forced atfter Opti­mus Prime and a hum­mer were spot­ted near to White Sands.

One report states:

” I did see Opti­mus Prime and that Hum­mer this after­noon around 12:15 pm going past White Sands Mis­sile Range, NM head­ing towards Hol­lo­man AFB. I didnt get any pics I was dri­ving in the oppo­site direction.”

Whilst these pic­tures were taken in Arizona:

News comes via TLAMB