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Exclusive: In what is shaping up to be the first project from Tom Rothman’s TriStar Productions, the Sony-based film company is in the process of acquiring To Reach The Clouds, the working title of the story of French high-wire artist Philippe Petit’s walk between the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center on August 7, 1974. Robert Zemeckis will direct the film, and he has co-written the script with Christopher Browne from Petit’s memoirs. This is a most ambitious first project for Rothman, because it carries on the spirit of experiential 3D films made under his reign at Fox including James Cameron’s Avatar and Ang Lee’s Life Of Pi. I’m told that Rothman got the idea to do this right when he was exiting the theater after seeing Alfonso Cuaron’s Gravity, and he began to think about projects with similar possibilities. He knew that Zemeckis...

In honor of those first reviews for Zero Dark Thirty, we thought we'd zero in on this little nugget from director Kathryn Bigelow's past, back when she was starring in awful music videos for bands like Martini Ranch. Martini Ranch (or “The Ranch,” as I like to call them) would have been completely forgettable if not for the fact that it was Bill Paxton’s band. Yeah, quirky actor Paxton once flirted with a music career – and this video, for the track "Reach," might be the most enduring memory of that ill-fated decision. As our colleague Alison Nastasi recently pointed out, Paxton is hardly the only famous guy to have an embarrassing piece of work hiding in his closet – but what makes "Reach" so special is that it...

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Halo 4 marks the return of Master Chief, but the story belongs to his holographic Girl Friday, Cortana, the endearing exposition-bot who resembles Tinkerbell with more snark and less clothes. After three games’ worth of alien-bashing alongside the Chief, Cortana has exceeded her natural lifespan. She’s falling into “rampancy,” a synthetic dementia that causes emotional outbursts at narratively convenient moments. Halo 4 has high stakes — Earth might be destroyed, again — but it’s really a story about planned obsolescence, about a machine trying to outlive its natural end date.

This is also, more or less, the mission statement of Halo 4, a...

James Cameron is, in case it has escaped your attention, the most successful filmmaker in history. The Canadian director hadn't exactly been starved for box-office smashes early in his career, but his last two films, "Titanic" and "Avatar," have hauled in nearly $5 billion between them, and are currently the number one and number two hits of all time. He's also the man behind the "Terminator" franchise, helmed one of the best-liked of the "Alien" series, has become a deep-sea explorer, and, uh, gave the world flying piranhas.

This week sees "Titanic" back on screens in post-converted 3D form, and given that we're still at least two years away from seeing the filmmaker's next work ("Avatar 2" and "Avatar 3" are currently targeted for around 2014/2015), it seemed like a good opportunity to look back on his career and see how he went from a visual effects whiz on "Escape From New York...

Within 24 hours of it’s launch, Microsoft generated$200 million for launch day sales of Halo: Reach. In doing so, the game managed to blast through the opening day box office totals of James Cameron’s cash machine Avatar as well, which only managed to garner $26.7 million on opening day. As a matter of fact, the single day total for Halo: Reach beat out the first week of Avatar‘s run in theaters which accumulated a total of just over $137 Million.

Microsoft VP Phil Spencer said,

“Halo: Reach is the biggest game Microsoft has ever released, and its launch has already surpassed every game, movie and entertainment launch this year.”

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 holds the current, single day sales record at $310 million from the U.S., Canada and the U.K. on its first day of sales last November. The game did have the advantage of being available on...

Last Thursday, I had a lengthy, terrific interview with James Cameron in advance of the special edition of Avatar (rereleased to theaters August 27), and all this week, Movieline will bring you pieces of that wide-ranging talk.

At the end of my conversation with James Cameron, was there any way I could let him go without asking him about "Reach," the only music video he ever directed? The deliciously surreal 1988 clip was made for Bill Paxton's band Martini Ranch, and not only did it feature frequent Cameron collaborators like Paxton, Jenette Goldstein, and Lance Henriksen, but it starred filmmaker Kathryn Bigelow as a sexy cowboy one year before Cameron married her, three years before they divorced, and twenty-two years before Bigelow won the Best Director Oscar over Cameron for The Hurt Locker.