Welcome to “Trailer Park,” our regular Friday feature where we collect the week’s new trailers all in one place and do a little “judging a book by its cover,” ranking them from worst to best and taking our best guess at what they may be hiding. We’ve got eight new trailers for you this week from all-star directors and former child stars; check ‘em all out after the jump.

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[Editor's note: While your Flavorwire editors take a much-needed holiday break, we're revisiting some of our most popular features of the year. This post was originally published August 10, 2011.] Earlier this summer, a shocking number of our readers flocked to read (and amend) our list of the harshest author-on-author insults in history. But you know who is even more childish, trifling, vindictive, and nasty than your favorite scribes? Your favorite filmmakers. These directors may not have quite the same precision with the written word as those rancorous authors, but when it comes to pettiness, they can’t be beat. After the jump, we’ll run down 30 of our favorite slights, slanders, and cheap shots from filmmakers both classic and contemporary; we’d love to hear yours in the comments.

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Welcome to “Trailer Park,” our regular Friday feature where we collect the week’s new trailers all in one place and do a little “judging a book by its cover,” ranking them from worst to best and taking our best guess at what they may be hiding. We’ve got seven new trailers this week, including, yes, Hunger Games; check ‘em out after the jump. Read More »

Last night Vulture caught up with James Cameron on the red carpet at Popular Mechanics’ Breakthrough Awards, and they took the opportunity to grill the famed director about his plans for the 2014 followup to Avatar. First, when asked about whether or not Sigourney Weaver is correct in thinking that she’ll be in the film’s sequel, he had this to say:

Well, I don’t want to disabuse her of that fantasy. But have you ever heard of nonlinear storytelling? A lot happens on that planet before she shows up, and before Jake shows up to join her. She’s there for fifteen years ahead of time. I don’t know, but I wouldn’t jump to conclusions.

Interesting! So there will be some prequel action to look forward to in the sequel. Then, when asked a followup question about whether or not her character is technically dead or not, Cameron explained, “When you have a science-fiction series, a science-fiction franchise, you’re never dead, unless your DNA is expunged from the universe. And then there’s always time travel!” What do you think the odds are that Dr. Grace Augustine will be back in the current storyline as well?

Everything Must Go, the low-key but masterful Will Ferrell comedy/drama (based on a Carver short story), hits DVD and Blu-ray today, and as with most recent releases, the disc includes a small selection of deleted scenes. More often than not, there isn’t a hell of a lot of value added by that particular bonus feature; we tend to see a lot of throwaway transition scenes, unnecessary exposition, or scenes so poorly written, directed, and/or played that the filmmakers were clearly wise to chop them. But on occasion, for reasons of pacing or time constraints, scenes are lost that are perfectly good in and of themselves — they merely don’t fit into the final version of the picture. That’s the case with Everything Must Go, which includes several charming little scenes that could easily have made the final cut.

So we decided to take a look at some of our favorite deleted scenes on DVD. A word of warning: as this is a phenomenon that only dates back to the age of the laserdisc, there is a decidedly modern bent to our rundown. While many classics were famously chopped by their studios or directors (Greed, The Magnificent Ambersons, and Sunset Blvd. leap to mind), no one saw any reason to keep those scenes around, and they’re (presumably) lost to the ages. (Maybe we’ll return to this topic at a later date.) At any rate, click through to see nine truly great deleted scenes — and one that may very well be the worst deleted scene of all time.

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On August 28, 2003, a pizza delivery man named Brian Wells walked into the PNC Bank in Erie, Pennsylvania with a bomb strapped to his chest. It was placed there by a pair of criminals who told Welles that if he did not acquire $250,000 from the bank, the bomb would detonate. Forty minutes later, Welles was apprehended by police; he frantically explained his predicament and begged the officers on scene for help. Twenty minutes later, the device exploded, blowing a softball-sized hole into Welles’s chest that killed him.

Hilarious, eh?

The writers of 30 Minutes or Less (which hits theaters tomorrow) apparently thought so, since they took the broad strokes of Wells’s strange story and turned it, improbably enough, into an ‘80s-style chase-heavy buddy summer action comedy. Sure, the names have been changed, as have a few of the details—for example, though 30 Minutes protagonist Nick (Jesse Eisenberg) is an ignorant victim, a subsequent investigation in the real case revealed that Wells was involved in the planning of the scheme, though he thought the bomb would be a phony (family members maintain his innocence). And—spoiler alert—they obviously changed the ending, since a softball-sized hole in Jesse Eisenberg is not exactly the cheeriest capper for your summer laugh riot. But the similarities between 30 Minutes and the Wells case, particularly in the details of the motive for the crime, are extensive (Movieline’s Jen Yamato provides a comprehensive rundown); nonetheless, Sony reps insist that though the writers were “vaguely familiar with what had occurred,” (vaguely!) “neither the filmmakers nor the stars of 30 Minutes or Less were aware of this crime prior to their involvement in the film.” Riiiight. Ain’t coincidences crazy?

Whatever the outcome of the controversy, and however you feel about 30 Minutes trying to spin a dead pizza guy into comic gold, it certainly doesn’t mark the first time that Hollywood has taken certain, shall we say, creative liberties with real life. We could fill the entirety of Flavorwire with instances of historical inaccuracies in the cinema; in the interest of brevity, we’ve instead selected ten particularly noteworthy cases of films that egregiously blurred the line between fact and fiction.

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Andrew Ainsworth, the British prop designer who made the stormtroopers’ helmets for George Lucas’s Star Wars back in 1977, won a Supreme Court case in Britain today that gives him the right to sell replicas of the costumes (which go for around $2,500 a pop) without permission from the filmmaker or his studio — as long as he doesn’t ship them to the US.

According to ArtsBeat, James Cameron, Peter Jackson, and Steven Spielberg, all wrote letters hoping to help tip the odds in Lucas’s favor, but ultimately had no impact on the court’s final decision: the helmets were props, not works of art, and as such, are not subject to British copyright law. “I am proud to report that in the English legal system David can prevail against Goliath if his cause is right,” Ainsworth said in a statement. “If there is a force, then it has been with me these past five years.”

On this day in 1986, James Cameron’s sci-fi/action epic Aliens was released in American theaters. A sequel to Ridley Scott’s 1979 scare-fest Alien, Cameron’s picture was a smash with both audiences and critics, raking in $85 million at the box office and racking up seven Oscar nominations, including a Best Actress nod for star Sigourney Weaver. More importantly, it reinvented Weaver’s Ellen Ripley as the kind of strong, muscular, tough action hero role played almost exclusively by male stars like Sylvester Stallone and Arnold Schwarzenegger. The trouble is, Aliens came out 25 years ago, and a female action hero like Ripley is still the exception to the rule.

Sure, there are occasional heirs — Milla Jovovich has fronted four Resident Evil movies (with a fifth on the way), Uma Thurman did the Kill Bills, and Linda Hamilton kicked major ass in Cameron’s Aliensfollow-up, Terminator 2. Susan Sarandon and Geena Davis co-starred in Thelma and Louise. And there’s Angelina Jolie, who raised heart rates in the Tomb Raider movies, Wanted, and Mr. and Mrs. Smith, as well as last year’s Salt — an action lead, incidentally, originally intended for Tom Cruise. But that’s a pretty lean mixture of ladies for 25 years of moviemaking. Why is the female action hero still such a rarity?

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This week’s news that DirecTV is launching a new, premium video-on-demand service, in which films that have been in theaters for as few as 60 days would be offered for home viewing (with a comparatively hefty $30 price tag) was mostly met with a collective shrug around here — mainly because the first movie on the menu is the tepid Sandler/Aniston effort Just Go With It, and seriously, who the hell would pay $30 to watch that sludge? But the notion of this collapsed “window” (the norm is about four months, though it was six or more in the VHS era) has got some filmmakers and suits all in a huff, and on Thursday, 23 of them signed their names to “AN OPEN LETTER FROM THE CREATIVE COMMUNITY ON PROTECTING THE MOVIE-GOING EXPERIENCE.” You can read it here. I’ve taken the liberty of drafting an open response (which I guess you can co-sign, in the comments, if you want?) after the jump.

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For a writer so beloved of the film industry’s core target market — i.e., teenagers with cash to burn — H.P. Lovecraft has remained curiously untouched by Hollywood. That was due to change this year, of course, with Guillermo del Toro realizing his long-cherished dream of a Lovecraft adaption. But with the $150 million project now having been put on hold indefinitely due to the studio’s budget worries, the door will have to remain closed. We can’t really think of anyone better placed to adapt Lovecraft than del Toro, but still — here’s a lighthearted look at how Lovecraft adaptations might haved turned out if they’d been helmed by various other prominent directors.

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