• You're Dreamworks Animation Chief Operating Officer Ann Daly. You want/need/have been told to mollify investors, who are rightfully up-in-arms over that whole Shrek 2 misreported-returns deal. What do you do? Apparently, you announce a full, two-pic-per year production slate, to take your studio through 2009. You also snatch up Jack Black to voice a lazy panda/unlikely hero in Kung-Fu Panda, which you then schedule for 2008. Pretty smart.
  • Uh-oh: it looks like Marry Harron's The Notorious Bettie Page is an all-around disappointment. We showed you the too-slick pics last night; now, Todd McCarthy's telling us that the whole endeavor is "tame and unsexy by the standards of HBO ... looks like a non-starter theatrically."
  • Palm Pictures has snatched up rights to yet another under-the-radar Sundance film, The Motel. Directed by first timer Michael Kang, and featuring a mostly Asian-American cast of semi-unknowns, the Miguel Arteta produced pic follows a 13-year-old boy who befriends an older Korean-American man whilst "blindly careening into puberty" and working at a crappy roadside lodge.
  • New Line and Hollywood Gang Productions are joining forces to aquire Eleven Minutes, the "sex-laced bestseller by Brazilian author Paulo Coelho." The story tracks "the sexual awakening of a Brazilian woman who heads to Geneva with visions of being a dancer. By the time she returns home, she is hardened and cynical after a stint as a high-priced call girl." So, in other words, it's basically the transcontinental remake of Showgirls.