I hate to spread totally speculative bad buzz, but if any advance development merits the term "not a good sign," it's a movie getting its release date pushed back seven months to early September, the year's most notorious dumping ground. Yep -- Richard Kelly's The Box is now scheduled to be released by Warner Bros. on September 11, 2009.

Now, to be clear, its original February release date wasn't exactly a plum spot either. But occasionally something sneaks through early in the year -- think Cloverfield. The few weeks around Labor Day are where movies go to die. The only recent exception I can think of is 3:10 to Yuma.

I'm hoping against hope that the switch isn't actually a vote of no confidence, since a Twilight Zone-style sci-fi film from the director of Donnie Darko sounds fantastic. If it is a low-confidence move, I'm hoping it's a case of a studio not knowing a good movie from a hole in the wall. That happens a fair amount, don't you know. Richard Kelly could use a boost after Southland Tales sank last year.

The Box is about a suburban couple who receive a mysterious wooden box with a single button. The box comes with a promise that if one of them presses the button in the next 24 hours, they will get a million dollars -- but somewhere in the world, someone will die. The film stars James Marsden, Cameron Diaz and Frank Langella.

[hat tip: Cinema Blend]

Did you know the Saturn Awards were last night? I sure didn't! You'll remember the Saturn Awards as where William Shatner did his famous rendition of "Rocketman" back in 1978. The Academy of Science Fiction, Fantasy and Horror Films has given them out to the best in genre cinema for 34 years now, and this year's picks are ... kind of strange.

The prize for Best Fantasy Film went to Enchanted, which I think is silly in a category that also included Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix and Stardust, but okay. Then Sweeney Todd took Best Horror Film, which seems to me like a way to avoid giving an award to an actual horror film, like fellow competitors 30 Days of Night, 1408 and The Mist. I guess I can see why Sweeney Todd would be classified as "horror" -- a lot of throats get slit, after all -- but it's a stretch. Then the kicker: Cloverfield wins Best Science-Fiction Film, beating out, among others, Sunshine. The problem is that not only is Cloverfield not a science-fiction film, it's in some ways the opposite of a science-fiction film. Science-fiction entails some sort of larger cosmic context for the fantastic goings-on, which is precisely what Cloverfield refuses to provide. It's a monster movie in its purest form -- horror, not sci-fi.

Before going to see Cloverfield, I read someone mention Michael Giacchino's fantastic musical score for the film. As it dawned on me that the movie proper had no musical score, I started to think that the writer had been making a sarcastic joke, and I hadn't read carefully enough to pick up on it. Of course, I was just being impatient: the music -- which is fantastic indeed -- shows up at the end. "Roar!", the beautiful 12-minute composition that played during Cloverfield's credits, is now available for a buck-ninety-nine, exclusively from the iTunes Music Store. Operatic and grand, it's a classical piece of movie music in the best John Williams/Jerry Goldsmith tradition.

iTunes has "Roar!" in its vastly superior "iTunes Plus" format, with a higher bit rate and no DRM -- so if, like me, you boycott anything with copy protection, it won't be off-limits. The movie itself is available for iTunes download starting today, as well.

Giacchino, one of Hollywood's genius composers of the moment, also scored this summer's Speed Racer, which makes me all the more excited for that film (though I seem increasingly to be the only one). He also has J.J. Abrams' Star Trek and Land of the Lost coming up.

[hat tip: Comingsoon.net]

I think everyone's been assuming that Matt Reeves, whose career ascended to another level this year thanks to Cloverfield, would go straight to directing the in-the-works sequel. In an interview with MTV this week, he made it clear that this isn't so. Cloverfield 2 is still happening, but another of his pet projects -- a psychological thriller called The Invisible Woman -- has raced ahead of it in the production pipeline. Not actually a movie about an invisible woman, its story instead involves a "woman that gets so desperate to save her family, that she goes to crazy lengths and enters a life of crime." Reeves, who wrote the film himself, describes it as "a Hitchcockian thriller in the vein of Marnie."

Though Cloverfield was written by Drew Goddard, Reeves wrote and directed the 90's David Schwimmer comedy The Pallbearer, and co-wrote the screenplay for Under Siege 2: Dark Territory. I've seen both, but I'll be damned if I remember either, though I have a vague recollection that Under Siege 2 was pretty fantastic in that way that some Steven Seagal movies can be. Not being the biggest fan of Cloverfield (I liked it well enough), I can wait for the sequel. If you can't -- uh, well, you'll have to. Sorry. The good news is that it still appears to be on the way.

That's right; everyone's favorite gore hound, Eli Roth (Hostel), is taking a vacation from blood and guts and trying something just a little different. Roth spoke with journalists backstage at the NME Awards in LA on Wednesday and announced his next project -- a PG-13 'disaster' flick along the lines of Transformers and Cloverfield. Roth told reporters, "This will be my first big-budget, PG-13, mass-destruction movie; I went total chaos and pandemonium." Roth didn't give many more details than that, but ever the self-promoter, he did tell reporters there would be a "big announcement" about the film next month.

So the obvious question is: Why the change of heart? This is the same guy who wanted topless beheaded chicks on his poster art after all. Roth said that, "I feel like I pushed the violence in R movies about as far as I can push it. I feel like I'm bled out. I wanna switch it up, everyone I know has been saying 'When are you gonna do a movie my kids can see?'" -- forget about kids, how about making a movie that doesn't make a fully-grown woman want to upchuck into her popcorn?

Those of us who saw Cloverfield in theaters this past January watched the monster movie in the wrong way. According to a new Reuters article, the movie's producer, J.J. Abrams, says it's really meant for home viewing: "The thing about this movie -- probably more than any I think -- is that it is better on DVD than in the theater," Abrams told Reuters. "Because the movie is like a videotape. It lives on your TV. In many ways, it is supposed to be viewed on a (TV) monitor."

Interesting. Wait, so does that mean I was correct when I wrote in my column, "The Exhibitionist", about Cloverfield being "theatrically inappropriate"? I went so far as to say that it had no business being shown in theaters at all, which I'm sure Abrams doesn't agree with, and I also said that it was most appropriately viewed in a YouTube window. I received some of my harshest criticism ever for that column, yet I don't mean to now jump around bragging that I was right and the commenters were wrong. Anytime a post on Cinematical can get 42 responses (or more), in which movie fans get into a heated discussion about films, formats and fun (as in the adjective used to describe the experience of seeing Cloverfield in a theater), is 100% a good thing. Yes, even when I'm said to be "misguided" or "having an off day".

As one giant monster is celebrated for destroying Manhattan, another is taken to court. Cloverfield stomps on DVD shelves in North America today (Erik Davis got an early look), and there's no question that the large, rampaging creature in that film was inspired by Godzilla. But the beast only bears a superficial resemblance to the Japanese Lizard King, and his urban rebuilding program was limited to Gotham City. What if he dared to destroy a Japanese city and more closely resembled Godzilla?

The Subway sandwich chain recently aired a new commercial that stepped over the line, in the eyes of Toho Co., the Japanese studio behind the original Godzilla movies. Toho filed a complaint in Los Angeles, according to The Japan Times, alleging that Subway "not only intentionally created a character that closely resembles Godzilla in its physical appearance, but placed the character in a setting, a Japanese city under attack, that is widely associated with Toho's Godzilla films."

Glenn Erickson, AKA DVD Savant, commented: "A big monster attacking a city isn't automatically Toho's private property -- or is it? Is Toho saying that another film company cannot make a movie about a giant monster stomping Tokyo?" He linked to the ad on YouTube; after watching it, I agree that the suit seems "really ridiculous." The monster appears for about four seconds and looks pretty generic. But you be the judge. Take a look at the video and decide for yourself: Does that monster look like Godzilla?

The best news about the new Cloverfield DVD is that you can pause it whenever you want in case -- ya know -- halfway through you feel a little motion sickness. It's been touted as "The Blair Witch Project meets Godzilla" or "a monster movie for the You Tube generation," but when it was all said and done Cloverfield turned out to be an original, captivating piece of filmmaking that took risks where other films of the genre would've played it safe. The initial "Holy crap, what is this movie!" is what attracted people opening weekend, when Cloverfield grossed a whopping $46 million before dropping off an equally-as-whopping 68% in box office totals the following weekend.

Was it the hand-held shakiness that kept people from seeing it ... and then seeing it again? Or was it because of the unusual storytelling techniques? Perhaps, in the end, folks simply enjoyed chasing the film through viral sites more than they did actually sitting down to watch it in a theater. Whatever the case may be, I'd definitely recommend picking up Cloverfield on DVD -- not only because it's much easier to deal with camera shakiness from your own, comfortable living room, but also because the special features truly add to the experience in a very positive way.

I love conceptually clever alien invasion films. I mean, Independence Day (humans fight aliens!) is fun, but something like Signs (humans fight aliens, from the point of view of one farm family) is way more gripping. And for all my problems with Cloverfield (which isn't quite an alien invasion movie, though I guess we don't really know that), its notion of an apocalyptic event viewed solely from the ground was brilliant, and the movie worked like gangbusters when it really engaged with that idea instead of focusing on the emotional tribulations of the numbskull characters.

Battle: Los Angeles (not to be confused with Battle in Seattle), which is being fast-tracked for Columbia from a script by Chris Bertolini (The General's Daughter), looks to be a movie like that. The story posits a large-scale alien invasion, but will focus on one marine platoon's role in Earth's effort to fight back on the streets of Los Angeles. I'm not sure any movie to date has tried to answer the question of what it's like for the poor military saps who inevitably get deployed against the terrifying alien attackers. (Starship Troopers is close, but not quite what I have in mind.) I mean, what about those guys who ran across the screen with grenade launchers in Cloverfield? What happened to them? Inquiring minds want to know.

Gambling college students and cartoon characters dominated North American screens last weekend, but in Asia things were a little different. "Bloody supernatural thriller" Art of the Devil 3 (pictured, thanks to Wise Kwai) scared up $1.3 million in Thailand, according to Variety. Local productions have performed well there this year; ensemble teen comedy Hormones continues to draw crowds after a big opening, and female-driven action butt-kicker Chocolate smashed records in February.

Audiences across the continent curled up with Three Kingdoms - Resurrection of the Dragon, the latest screen adaptation of classic Chinese literature. The pic finished at the top of the charts in mainland China, Hong Kong and Singapore, though not as well in South Korea, according to a different article in Variety. Andy Lau, Sammo Hung and Maggie Q star.