In the original ending, sociopathic superhero Adrian Veidt attempts to avert nuclear hostilities between the U.S. and Russia by giving both countries a common enemy: a giant, psychic squid (drawn by artists who Veidt has kidnapped, then created using Veidt's powers) which Veidt will warp into New York City, creating death and carnage. If it sounds a bit silly to describe, Snyder must have had the same instincts, since word is that the squid has been scrapped entirely.

Instead, Snyder's Veidt (played by Matthew Goode) uses a machine he has invented to stud cities around the world with explosions, framing the deed on one of his fellow watchmen: Dr. Manhattan (Billy Crudup). The chilly Manhattan is weirdly OK with that idea, but then, Manhattan is kind of weirdly OK about everything.

Should Snyder invest in some beefed-up security, or will audiences be too exhausted by the film's nearly three-hour running time to care what happens at the end? We're tentatively on board with the change (frankly, we always felt that there were a few problems with the last act of Watchmen), but we'd advise Snyder to keep an eye out for masked vigilantes.

• Did Zack Snyder Change the Ending of ‘Watchmen’ to Make it More Like ‘The Dark Knight’? [New York]

Boomp3.com

King Leonidas, aka Gerard Butler, appeared to be more enthralled by the women of New York City in their summer clothes than the latest and hottest script from Hollywood. Butler said, "I'm sorry, but that girl in the sun dress and that girl with the rolled up Juicy sweatpants that are way more compelling than William Monahan's stab at a romantic comedy." Butler pulled out another script from his messenger bag, but once again became distracted when a group of women exited a nearby Crunch. Butler threw the script back into his bag and promptly left the restaurant. Butler muttered under his breath, "Where does a man have to go to get some reading done in peace? The library? That place smells and it's full of nerds!"

[Photo Credit: Splash Pics]

*A Call To The Bullpen is a work of fiction. Although the pictures we use are most certainly real, Defamer does not purport that any of the incidents or quotations you see in this piece actually happened. Lighten up, people ... it's a joke.

Then, right on cynical cue, Relativity Media and the vampires who brought you 300 announced they had attached Tarsem Singh to direct some fucking "mythology epic" called War of Gods. So confusing, Hollywood! Is it a clash or a war? And must we really have it both ways?

Michael Fleming has more heart-pinching details at Variety:

The original 1981 Clash of the Titans starred Harry Hamlin as Perseus and Laurence Olivier as Zeus but is best remembered for Ray Harryhausen's visual effects that brought to life Medusa, the Kraken and other creatures. ...

[Gods producer Gianni] Nunnari said his film has the goods: "Gods, titans, warriors and a fantastic script. An incredibly visionary filmmaker like Tarsem and a partner like Relativity who fought and won already in a battle in getting the package that everybody wanted."

Making matters worse, the duel recalls Deep Impact v. Armageddon, Volcano vs. Dante's Peak, Vice Versa vs. Like Father Like Son, Capote vs. Infamous and countless other cutthroat genre races to the release-date finish line, reminding us that only one of these titles can ride its bad greenscreen, CGI and oil-slicked abs to the summit of Mount Blockbuster. As Kasdan has earned our ever-dwindling benefit of the doubt, we'll grudgingly call our shot early. But without Harryhausen's signature cheese or the late Burgess Meredith's guest spot as Perseus' Athens-by-way-of-Brooklyn sidekick, it's just another day for us in the development trenches, sobbing for our childhoods.

• 'Gods' go to War with 'Titans' [Variety]

1. Beowulf - $28.1 million
That Beowulf's opening weekend finished more than $40 million behind the blockbuster debut of 300 confirms what we'd already suspected: that a single, CGI-sculpted Ray Winstone sixpack, even when supplemented by a gilded, digitally bazoomed Angelina Jolie, simply cannot compete with an entire battalion's worth of glistening Spartan washboards. The next time director Robert Zemeckis decides to break out his motion-capture technology, he may want to find a few hundred more doughy English actors onto which he can impose abdominal perfection.

2. Bee Movie - $14.3 million
Once Jerry Seinfeld's risky foray into the feature world passes the coveted nine-figure box office milestone this coming weekend, expect the vindicated comedian to take out a full-page ad in the trades trumpeting the accomplishment, in which Seinfeld, again donning his Cannes bee suit, extends a defiant middle finger towards the reader over a headline declaring: "I TOOK A JOKE I TOLD SPIELBERG OVER DINNER AND MADE $100 MILLION WITH IT. SUCK IT, HOLLYWOOD. I HAVE NOTHING LEFT TO PROVE TO YOU."

3. American Gangster - $13.218 million
The next step in Russell Crowe and Denzel Washington's on-screen partnership will be, we hope, a buddy comedy. Dare we dream that someone (read: Brian Grazer) can find a way to put them into a remake of Lethal Weapon or 48 Hours?

4. Fred Claus - $12 million
Vince Vaughn is said to be very interested in working with Beowulf's Robert Zemeckis on a future project, intrigued that the director's lazy-actor-slimming technology might allow him to once again revert to his The Break-Up weight without suffering any career consequences.

5. Mr. Magorium's Wonder Emporium - $10.025 million
Unfortunately for Fox, the irresistible smell of cake they'd hoped would linger in potential ticket-buyers' olfactory memories for months seems to have long faded, resulting in a weak opening for their whimsical family film.

• Weekend Box Office November 16-18, 2007 [Box Office Mojo]

[I]t's clear that they've been studying the ad campaign for "300" very carefully. Among many stylistic and clear similarities between each films' trailers, here are a few highlights:

· Both trailers have the lead, bearded, warrior hero, in closeup, loudly proclaiming that "THIS! IS! SPARTA!", or, "I! AM! BEOWULF!"

· Each trailer has an anachronistic guitar-riff-filled montage of violence, wrapped up with our warrior hero proclaiming something about "TONIGHT..." · And, most obviously, each trailer's graphics are rough, bold, blood red, and set against time-lapse clouds with lightning bursts.

Film marketers, of course, have never been above engaging in the sincerest form of flattery if it means drawing a few more fanboys and Spartan-lusting gays into the megaplex. And be prepared for yet more plagiarism in an upcoming spot aimed squarely at the female demo, craftily edited to K.T. Tunstall's "Suddenly I See" to make it seem as if the movie is about a gold-dipped Angelina Jolie having taken a job as the assistant to the haughty editor of a major fashion magazine.

• Movie Marketing is Hard! "Beowulf" and "300" [FXRant]

• One Letter Off 2 [Worth1000]

Lesson No. 1: Sometimes it really is about what you put on the screen, and maybe you don't need to put as much up there as you might think. As far as epic wannabes go, 300 is modest, yet audiences are eating it up.

The nonstop action came from computers, the actors were, well, wooden, and still the trailers and commercials were mesmerizing. Sometimes a great visual is worth more than heavyweight actors and a legion of writers.

We doubt the news that deeply underestimating your audience's disdain for well-executed storytelling might sometimes result in spectacular commercial results is going to cause any seismic shifts in the current system, as Hollywood has been operating on that very fundamental for quite some time now. Still, it's the advances ushered in by 300's groundbreaking shitty-moving-making technology that could forever change the shitty-movie-making game as we know it, ushering in the demise of the actor-screenwriter system that will be replaced by productions exclusively shot on football-stadium-sized soundstages, starring a couple of dozen homeless men dressed in green body-stockings and told to "just move around and say whatever, we'll add the rest in post."

• 300's Lessons for Hollywood [BusinessWeek.com via Wiretap]

Gangbanged by 300 Spartans - 21 Reply to: pers-297111884@craigslist.org Date: 2007-03-20, 2:11AM PDT

Just saw 300 and had a hardon all through movie...wanted to be gang raped by those fucking hot warriors...want to take Gerard Butlers load on my face first...any one want to help me maje this fantasy a reality? hit me up...

Gentlemen: (sorry, ladies, your services are currently not required, though we may need to cut back to you every 30 minutes as you fend off the rear-entry advances of a traitorous Spartan councilman) we ask that you not force our action-hungry recruit to wait all the way until the West Hollywood Halloween parade to put his double-stuffed Spartan-servicing skills to practical use. We implore you to answer the call to glory-hole now by responding to his request—and yes, hunchback turncoats, there's even space at the gang-rape table for you!

• Gangbanged by 300 Spartans - 21 [Craigslist]

· It's funny because it's true: no balls in this town get licked without the all-important conference call.
· Had enough of the 300 parodies yet? Yeah, neither have we.
· TMNT packs all of the pizza-chomping thrills of a Leni Riefenstahl film.
· While Batman is off taking a toke break, the Joker is is busy plotting his boner-related revenge.
· We swear, we were only kidding about Zsa Zsa Gabor's batshit husband getting back in to the Dannielynn Smith paternity sweepstakes.

• Black20 Trailer Park: 300 - PG Version [YouTube]

In the post-post Brokeback mash-up era, setting the trailer for a movie in which nearly every frame is filled with the CGI-enhanced six-packs of three-quarters-naked, glistening Greeks to "It's Raining Men" might be a little too easy. But in truth, a flick whose pivotal scene involves a proud King refusing an initiation to kneel down in supplication before a freshly waxed, liberally pierced god-warrior draped in spangly chains (who, it should be noted, travels the countryside in a mobile Vegas hotel shuttled to and fro by strong-backed rentboys) by defiantly shrugging off a seductive shoulder rub and reciting the lyrics to "I Will Survive" is kind of asking for it.

There's a longer version (from a different source) here, but we definitely prefer the punchier, 53-second clip above.

• 300 [YouTube]
• 300 - It's Raining Men [YouTube]

1. 300—$31 million
Despite a precipitous drop-off from last weekend's stunning $70 million opening (it's OK—obsessive Hellenic history fans are notorious for rushing to theaters to see operatically homoerotic, CGI-enhanced reenactments of their favorite historical battles), Warner Bros. is already rushing a sequel into production. The tentatively titled 301 will be ninety minutes of nothing but beautifully rendered, comic book panel-inspired images of Sparta's fiercest warrior and a leftover Persian interloper repeatedly stabbing each other in their perfectly sculpted abs. Predicted opening weekend: $85 million, summer of 2009.

2. Wild Hogs—$18.825 million
We'd be depressed that Wild Hogs has so quickly crossed the $100 million milestone, but having to occasionally think about this movie over the past three weeks has already made us too dead inside to really care.

3. Premonition—$18 million
It seems crazy to say this, but Premonition is actually Sandra Bullock's strongest opening ever—eclipsing even career-defining blockbusters like Hope Floats and Practical Magic.

4. Dead Silence—$7.771 million
We'll have to do a little research and figure out what that Sandra Bullock movie is about first, but we're pretty sure our bold prediction of last week has come to pass: Dead SIlence is the number one ventriloquism-related horror movie of the weekend of March 17th! Amazing!

5. I Think I Love My Wife—$5.715 million
Strange...Chris Rock remaking an Eric Rohmer film seemed like such a commercial slam dunk when it was announced. Executives at Fox Searchlight are surely meaningfully rubbing their chins this morning, baffled by trying to figure out what might have gone wrong between surefire conception and ultimately disappointing execution.

• March 16-18, 2007 Studio Estimates [Box Office Mojo]