Well, here's some news I've been hoping to write up for a long while now ... director Vadim Perelman has officially dropped the adaptation of Atlas Shrugged, which is presumably still set to star Angelina Jolie as Dagny Taggart. Perelman signed on to the project last September, and as recently as April ComingSoon.net reported that the project was still a go. It may or may not still be moving forward, but I have it from the most reliable source possible -- Perelman himself -- that it will not be going forward with him at the helm.

CHUD wrote up this piece about Angelina Jolie supposedly telling MTV that Perelman was never signed to direct at all -- something Perelman finds interesting, since he had a signed contract that attached him, and Lionsgate (not Perelman, as CHUD asserts, though Perelman has done interviews about his attachment to the project) had put out many press releases announcing him as the director. Perelman was attached, and I can say with as much certainty as one can possibly have about a situation like this that the decision to step down was on Perelman's side.

I've been mulling over the whole issue of the Atlas Shrugged film adaptation, which, at the moment at least, seems to be churning ahead to start filming later this year, and I wanted to talk about something several commenters have mentioned: whether it would be better to film Atlas as a miniseries, as opposed to a two-hour-or-longer movie. Of course, attempts have been made to bring Ayn Rand's most famous book to the screen before, and they've never made it past the script stage.

Why? Well, first of all, there are a lot of politics around this book. The Ayn Rand Institute and Leonard Peikoff have been notoriously protective of it for years, and trying to make a film that's going to please both the hardcore Objectivists (those who follow Rand's philosophy) and the average moviegoer who just wants to be entertained is, in my opinion, just an exercise in futility. Then I read this interview over on The Atlasphere with John Aglialoro, producer and CEO of Cybex, International, who paid $1 million for the film rights to Atlas.