Movie News: Steven Spielberg sued, Depp confirmed as Riddler?

Steven Spielberg, DreamWorks and Paramount Pictures Corp. are bing sued for allegedly ‘borrowing to much’ from “Rear Window” when they made the movie “Disturbia.”

“Disturbia,” a 2007 thriller, which starred Shia LaBeouf as a kid on house arrest that spies on a neighbor, who he suspects is a serial killer.

The copyright infringement lawsuit, filed Monday in Manhattan, says “Disturbia” copied a short story Cornell Woolrich wrote in 1942 and the 1954 Alfred Hitchcock movie that starred James Stewart and Grace Kelly and was based on the story.

Woolrich died in 1968. The rights to “Rear Window” were sold to Sheldon Abend, who died in 2003. His estate brought the lawsuit, which seeks unspecified damages.

I saw both movies and it seems like now-a-days there are so many films with similar ideas that copyright infringement laws held to this standard would preclude many new movies from being made today.

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In an interview with MTV News conducted at the Toronto Film Festival, Michael Caine who is there to promote “Is There Anybody There?” — seemed to confirm rumors that the next installment of the “Batman” film franchise will feature The Riddler and The Penguin. “They’ve already got them in mind,” said Caine who stars in The Dark Night as loyal butler Alfred, when asked who he’d like to see take up arms against the Caped Crusader. “It’s Johnny Depp as The Riddler. And The Penguin is Philip Seymour Hoffman. I read it in the paper.” But according to the veteren actor, he confirmed the news through the studio itself:

“I was with [a Warner Bros.] executive and I said, ‘Are we going to make another one?’ They said yeah. I said, ‘How the hell are we going to top Heath? And he says ‘I’ll tell you how you top Heath — Johnny Depp as The Riddler and Philip Seymour Hoffman as The Penguin.’ I said, ‘S–t, they’ve done it again!’” [Laughs]

So if true would you be excited to see Depp take his shot at playing the Riddler? And what criminal do you really want to see next? Is it time to stop the rehashing of old enemies like Catwoman, Riddler and Penguin and bring in a fresh evil face?