Is an X-Force Film in the Works?

UPDATE: Well, that didn't take long. The Hollywood Reporter has learned that Kick-Ass 2 director Jeff Wadlow will write the X-Force script for 20th Century Fox with an eye to direct. X-Men franchise producer Lauren Shuller Donner is also onboard. Original story follows...

There are rumours that a X-Force movie could be made after the release of Bryan Singer's X-Men: Days of Future Past, due for release May 2014.

20th Century Fox recently registered the domain X-ForceMovie.com, as spotted by X-Menfilms (via DigitalSpy). Previous X-Men titles have been discovered in a similar way in the past.

X-Force focuses on a superhero team of mutants led by Cable, Cyclop's son from the future. It has a slightly different, more mature tone than the X-Men.

Possibly lending this additional credence is the fact Mark Millar – Fox's consultant on all its future Marvel projects – has recently spoken about possibility of a X-Force movie.

“You have to remember that Fox grabbed the X-Men back in the ’90s because it was the biggest franchise in the world," said Millar in an interview with CBR. "So X-Force or Cable or Deadpool — all these amazing characters are things we haven’t really gotten to yet. ‘X-Force’ #1 was the second biggest book of all time behind Jim Lee’s ‘X-Men’ #1, so there’s an immediate brand recognition to that stuff and a build in fanbase. You go to any convention in the world, and you’ll see 20 people dressed as Deadpool. In a lot of ways, these are Marvel’s coolest characters, so I want to remind people of that and build on what we already have."

And we know Warpath, a one time member of the X-Force team, will also appear in Days of Future Past. It's likely the domain has been registered in case Fox want to proceed with the project at a later date. It could be spin-off or conceivably even a sequel; either way, production will likely rest upon the success of X-Men: Days of Future Past.

Daniel is IGN's UK Staff Writer. You can be part of the world's most embarrassing cult by following him on IGN and Twitter.

Advertising: ABC Works on an App for Live Streaming Shows to Mobile Devices

The app will live stream ABC programming to the phones and tablets of cable and satellite subscribers, allowing those subscribers to watch “Good Morning America” on a tablet while standing in line at Starbucks, for instance, or watch “Nashville” on a smartphone while riding a bus home from work. The app could become available to some subscribers this year, according to people briefed on the project, who insisted on anonymity because they were not authorized to speak about it publicly.

With the app, ABC, a subsidiary of Disney, will become the first of the American broadcasters to provide a live Internet stream of national and local programming to people who pay for cable or satellite. The subscriber-only arrangement, sometimes called TV Everywhere in industry circles, preserves the cable business model that is crucial to the bottom lines of broadcasters, while giving subscribers more of what they seem to want — mobile access to TV shows. The arrangement could extend the reach of ads that appear on ABC as well.

Disney already distributes similar live streaming and on-demand apps, known as “Watch” apps, for ESPN and the Disney Channel. Special hurdles exist, however, for the ABC app, in part because of contracts between the network and the companies that produce some of its shows that were written before mobile phone video streaming was even possible. Other complexities involve ABC’s local stations, which might — if not courted properly — feel threatened by an app.

But ABC, seeing shifts in consumer behavior, is pressing forward. It has started to talk with stations about how to include them in the live streaming app. Illustrating the difficult contractual issues, ABC offhandedly first mentioned a forthcoming Watch ABC app in a news release nine months ago, when it signed a deal with Comcast to make several Watch Disney apps available to Comcast subscribers.

But the network live streaming ability is inching closer to fruition, the people briefed on the project said. A spokesman for ABC declined to comment.

Executives at other networks who have heard about the ABC plan regard it with a mixture of awe and fear. No other broadcaster is believed to be as far along as ABC, which is also the first broadcaster to sell TV episodes through Apple’s iTunes store and the first to stream free episodes on its Web site.

Subscriber-only apps like Watch Disney and, eventually, Watch ABC stand in stark contrast to the free-to-all content available on Hulu, the online video site that is co-owned by Disney, Comcast and News Corporation. Comcast is a silent partner. The other two companies are debating what to do with the six-year-old Web site, which has lost most of its original executive backers at NBC and Fox and will soon lose its founding chief executive, Jason Kilar.

Last week, when Mr. Kilar, who is stepping down this month, named an acting chief executive, Andy Forssell, he wrote in a message to staff members that “Disney and News Corporation are currently finalizing their forward-looking plans with Hulu, and the senior team has been working closely with them in that process. Once the plans are finalized, a permanent decision will be made regarding the C.E.O. position.”

Hulu has been an innovator in both the Web streaming and the advertising arenas, forcing media companies to think about how their TV shows should be distributed online. But it has been marginalized as the companies seek out more lucrative revenue streams.

Under one plan discussed recently, according to several people with ties to Hulu, Disney would buy out the other co-owners’ stakes in the company. But the opposite could happen, too, with News Corporation as the buyer. Or the two companies may choose to sell Hulu to a third party, if one shows interest.

The companies could also retain their stakes in Hulu and change the business model. Disney is said to be more supportive of the free, ad-supported model that it is most closely associated with; News Corporation is more supportive of Hulu Plus, the monthly subscription service that is an add-on to the free Hulu site. Mr. Kilar, in his message last week, did not indicate when any change could take place.

Whatever happens, the owners appear more interested in maintaining their existing relationships with cable and satellite companies. That is what an app like Watch ABC would do. It would protect the cable model while providing a good example of how authentication — the idea that people log in to prove they have a subscription — works.

A few cable and satellite companies already have their own products that allow ABC and other broadcasters to be streamed on devices. But for most Americans, it remains difficult to place-shift a show — say, to watch a local nightly newscast live on an iPhone.

A start-up company that is being sued by Disney and several other major media companies, Aereo, has made that possible by installing an antenna farm in New York; some analysts have said Aereo might motivate broadcasters to make their own live streams more freely available on their own terms. But James L. McQuivey, a digital media analyst at Forrester and the author of the book “Digital Disruption,” said he thought ABC’s plan wasn’t a rebuttal to the start-up.

“This and Aereo are both a response to the fact that people are habitually connected to live viewing,” he said. “The Internet will gradually undo that,” he predicted, “but it’s being very gradual about that for the time being.”

Brooks Barnes contributed reporting.

Novelties: Pilot Plant in the Works for Carbon Dioxide Cleansing

Now a Canadian company has developed a cleansing technology that may one day capture and remove some of this heat-trapping gas directly from the sky. And it is even possible that the gas could then be sold for industrial use.

Carbon Engineering, formed in 2009 with $3.5 million from Bill Gates and others, created prototypes for parts of its cleanup system in 2011 and 2012 at its plant in Calgary, Alberta. The company, which recently closed a $3 million second round of financing, plans to build a complete pilot plant by the end of 2014 for capturing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, said David Keith, its president and a Harvard professor who has long been interested in climate issues.

The carbon-capturing tools that Carbon Engineering and other companies are designing have made great strides in the last two years, said Timothy A. Fox, head of energy and environment at the Institution of Mechanical Engineers in London.

“The technology has moved from a position where people talked about the potential and possibilities to a point where people like David Keith are testing prototype components and producing quite detailed designs and engineering plans,” Dr. Fox said. “Carbon Engineering is the leading contender in this field at this moment for putting an industrial-scale machine together and getting it working.”

Should the cost of capturing carbon dioxide fall low enough, the gas would have many customers, he predicted. Chief among them, he said, would be the oil industry, which buys the gas to inject into oil fields to force out extra oil. The injection has minimal risk, said Howard J. Herzog, a senior research engineer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “The enhanced oil recovery industry has put tens of millions of tons of carbon dioxide into the ground every year for decades with no problems,” he said.

Much of the carbon dioxide for enhanced oil recovery comes from naturally occurring underground reserves that are piped to oil fields, said Sasha Mackler, vice president of Summit Carbon Capture, a unit of Summit Power Group in Seattle. Summit Carbon Capture harvests carbon dioxide gas from coal and natural gas-burning plants before it can be spewed into the air.

The global demand for carbon dioxide will only grow as oil becomes scarcer and demands for transportation fuel rise, Mr. Mackler said. Direct capture from the atmosphere would offer another source for the gas.

Yet the cost of capturing carbon dioxide directly from the air has yet to be demonstrated, said Alain Goeppert, a senior research scientist at the Loker Hydrocarbon Research Institute at the University of Southern California. Dr. Goeppert recently reviewed the literature of air capture technology.

“There is a lot of speculation of how much it will actually cost,” he said, with estimates from $20 a ton to as much as $2,000. “We won’t know for sure until someone builds a pilot plant.” (An average passenger vehicle generates about five tons of carbon dioxide a year.)

Dr. Keith says he thinks it may be possible to lower the cost of capture toward $100 a ton as the company grows.

Carbon Engineering’s machines use a carbon-dioxide-absorbing solution of caustic soda to remove the gas from the air. “The issue at the pilot plant,” Dr. Keith said, “will be to test the equipment at the scale the vendors tell us they need” to provide performance guarantees for a full commercial plant. The process is intended to collect at least 100,000 tons a year of the gas.

The concentration of carbon dioxide scrubbed from the flue gases of coal- and gas-fired power plants is about 5 percent to 15 percent higher than that in the air, where it is about 393 parts per million. “You have to handle much larger volumes of gases” to capture the same amount of carbon dioxide from the air that you would from power plant flue gases, Dr. Goeppert said. “But Dr. Keith is going to be able to capture it with the absorbent he uses.”

The recovered carbon dioxide may be sold one day, not only for enhanced oil recovery, but also to feed algae to produce biofuel. It may also be sequestered in places like unmineable coal seams and oil and gas reservoirs, says a new Energy Department report.

Gas capture would be extremely important in developing a rational price for carbon emissions, said Dr. Fox of the British mechanical engineering society. “Whatever it costs to take it out of the air and store it away,” Dr. Fox said, “that’s the price polluters would pay if they want to put carbon into the air.”

Another advantage of direct air capture is geographic flexibility. “It doesn’t matter where you take the carbon dioxide out,” he said, since the gas is mixed evenly in the earth’s atmosphere. “You could have air capture machines in the Australian desert to account for New York City car emissions.”

Most important, air capture could be used to get rid of that last fraction of carbon dioxide that escapes into the air, for example, even from power plants outfitted to collect most of their emissions, said Klaus S. Lackner, a Columbia professor and a board member and adviser to Kilimanjaro Energy, another company working on collecting atmospheric carbon dioxide.

“I see direct air capture as the long-term way of dealing with all those emissions that can’t be dealt with in any other way,” he said.

E-mail: novelties@nytimes.com.

Novelties: Pilot Plant in the Works for Carbon Dioxide Cleansing

Now a Canadian company has developed a cleansing technology that may one day capture and remove some of this heat-trapping gas directly from the sky. And it is even possible that the gas could then be sold for industrial use.

Carbon Engineering, formed in 2009 with $3.5 million from Bill Gates and others, created prototypes for parts of its cleanup system in 2011 and 2012 at its plant in Calgary, Alberta. The company, which recently closed a $3 million second round of financing, plans to build a complete pilot plant by the end of 2014 for capturing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, said David Keith, its president and a Harvard professor who has long been interested in climate issues.

The carbon-capturing tools that Carbon Engineering and other companies are designing have made great strides in the last two years, said Timothy A. Fox, head of energy and environment at the Institution of Mechanical Engineers in London.

“The technology has moved from a position where people talked about the potential and possibilities to a point where people like David Keith are testing prototype components and producing quite detailed designs and engineering plans,” Dr. Fox said. “Carbon Engineering is the leading contender in this field at this moment for putting an industrial-scale machine together and getting it working.”

Should the cost of capturing carbon dioxide fall low enough, the gas would have many customers, he predicted. Chief among them, he said, would be the oil industry, which buys the gas to inject into oil fields to force out extra oil. The injection has minimal risk, said Howard J. Herzog, a senior research engineer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “The enhanced oil recovery industry has put tens of millions of tons of carbon dioxide into the ground every year for decades with no problems,” he said.

Much of the carbon dioxide for enhanced oil recovery comes from naturally occurring underground reserves that are piped to oil fields, said Sasha Mackler, vice president of Summit Carbon Capture, a unit of Summit Power Group in Seattle. Summit Carbon Capture harvests carbon dioxide gas from coal and natural gas-burning plants before it can be spewed into the air.

The global demand for carbon dioxide will only grow as oil becomes scarcer and demands for transportation fuel rise, Mr. Mackler said. Direct capture from the atmosphere would offer another source for the gas.

Yet the cost of capturing carbon dioxide directly from the air has yet to be demonstrated, said Alain Goeppert, a senior research scientist at the Loker Hydrocarbon Research Institute at the University of Southern California. Dr. Goeppert recently reviewed the literature of air capture technology.

“There is a lot of speculation of how much it will actually cost,” he said, with estimates from $20 a ton to as much as $2,000. “We won’t know for sure until someone builds a pilot plant.” (An average passenger vehicle generates about five tons of carbon dioxide a year.)

Dr. Keith says he thinks it may be possible to lower the cost of capture toward $100 a ton as the company grows.

Carbon Engineering’s machines use a carbon-dioxide-absorbing solution of caustic soda to remove the gas from the air. “The issue at the pilot plant,” Dr. Keith said, “will be to test the equipment at the scale the vendors tell us they need” to provide performance guarantees for a full commercial plant. The process is intended to collect at least 100,000 tons a year of the gas.

The concentration of carbon dioxide scrubbed from the flue gases of coal- and gas-fired power plants is about 5 percent to 15 percent higher than that in the air, where it is about 393 parts per million. “You have to handle much larger volumes of gases” to capture the same amount of carbon dioxide from the air that you would from power plant flue gases, Dr. Goeppert said. “But Dr. Keith is going to be able to capture it with the absorbent he uses.”

The recovered carbon dioxide may be sold one day, not only for enhanced oil recovery, but also to feed algae to produce biofuel. It may also be sequestered in places like unmineable coal seams and oil and gas reservoirs, says a new Energy Department report.

Gas capture would be extremely important in developing a rational price for carbon emissions, said Dr. Fox of the British mechanical engineering society. “Whatever it costs to take it out of the air and store it away,” Dr. Fox said, “that’s the price polluters would pay if they want to put carbon into the air.”

Another advantage of direct air capture is geographic flexibility. “It doesn’t matter where you take the carbon dioxide out,” he said, since the gas is mixed evenly in the earth’s atmosphere. “You could have air capture machines in the Australian desert to account for New York City car emissions.”

Most important, air capture could be used to get rid of that last fraction of carbon dioxide that escapes into the air, for example, even from power plants outfitted to collect most of their emissions, said Klaus S. Lackner, a Columbia professor and a board member and adviser to Kilimanjaro Energy, another company working on collecting atmospheric carbon dioxide.

“I see direct air capture as the long-term way of dealing with all those emissions that can’t be dealt with in any other way,” he said.

E-mail: novelties@nytimes.com.

Advertising: Adobe Marketing Campaign Works With Coarse Language

In this instance, the brand is Adobe, which in a campaign getting under way this week seeks to support efforts by marketers to prove to their bosses that spending on advertising is not a waste of money. The campaign portrays products like Adobe Analytics, Adobe Media Optimizer and Adobe Social as valuable tools for marketing executives who want to debunk myths like “Social media is worthless” and “Marketing is baloney.”

Except that Adobe Systems and its agency — Goodby, Silverstein & Partners in San Francisco, part of the Omnicom Group — do not say “baloney” in the ad. Rather, they use an abbreviation for a word that a family newspaper would describe as a barnyard epithet.

The full epithet, with an asterisk replacing a letter, appears on a document that Adobe is circulating internally to explain that the purpose of the campaign is to prove that marketing can no longer be dismissed with the epithet because “today’s campaigns are rooted in hard data and powerful insights.”And the epithet appears unexpurgated in Web video clips that are part of the campaign, visible briefly on a Dymo-style label affixed to a fanciful detector contraption in scenes set in (make-believe) focus group sessions.

Adobe Systems will spend an estimated $10 million to run the campaign in the United States for the next three months. The decision to use the provocative language is indicative of a trend for ads to speak more in the vernacular than in the formal phraseology that was standard for so many decades. The frank language and colloquial expressions follow the loosening of societal standards for discourse, reflecting how marketers seek to mirror changes in consumers.

For instance, Procter & Gamble, for decades a model of rectitude in its ads, is now often adopting the look and feel “of YouTube video” when producing television commercials, said Marc S. Pritchard, global marketing and brand building officer at Procter.

That is why in a recent commercial for Tide detergent, in which a couple talk about the value of Tide versus lower-priced alternatives, the actress playing the wife tells the actor playing the husband that he stinks at folding clothes — only she uses a far more direct verb.

“We’re a family company,” Mr. Pritchard said in a speech at the 2012 annual conference of the Association of National Advertisers, and “there was more than a little discussion about that line.”

But new efforts for Tide that include the franker commercial have helped the brand grow “more than two-and-a-half share points in the last three months alone,” Mr. Pritchard said, referring to market share.

For Adobe, said Ann Lewnes, chief marketing officer at Adobe Systems in San Jose, Calif., the language represents “a bold and provocative way to get attention.”

“I think Adobe is not known for being provocative or bold,” Ms. Lewnes said. “We’re ‘a nice software company.’ ”

“But in this crowded space, with a lot of competition, the intent is to break through, jolt the market,” she added.

Asked if the strategy was risky, Ms. Lewnes replied: “I don’t think so at all. I think good advertising is always somewhat polarizing.”

The campaign is based on the premise that “marketers feel angry about being misunderstood,” she said, and the language in the campaign is meant to reflect that.

The campaign includes, in addition to the Web video, advertisements in newspapers and magazines, and online; sponsored content on mashable.com and theonion.com; sharing the metrics of the campaign, in real time, on adobe.com; and social media like Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and YouTube. On Twitter, Adobe will use the hashtag “#MetricsNotMyths” to underline the campaign’s theme.

The barnyard epithet is appropriate for the campaign because “for a long time, people did not know if the work was working, so you had to use a little” baloney in discussing the effectiveness of the advertising with other executives in the C-suite, said Keith Anderson, associate partner and executive design director at Goodby, Silverstein.

“It made you feel less confident,” Mr. Anderson said. “But now, you can know, you don’t have to guess, you can have hard facts to back you up.”

The frankness of the campaign also signals that the agency and Adobe Systems realize “if we were flowery, overly clever, jargony, the more it would feel like we were doing the same thing we were saying people don’t need to do anymore,” he added.

“We did look at other ways of making that statement” than to use the epithet, Mr. Anderson said, but it was decided to proceed because “the goal is to be provocative and reset the conversation.”

The language also conveys that Adobe is “plain-spoken,” he added, “and talks the way people talk.”

The products being advertised in the campaign compose what Adobe Systems is calling the Adobe Marketing Cloud, which competes against products sold by many companies; among them, Ms. Lewnes listed Google, I.B.M., Kenshoo and Salesforce.

The campaign is supplementing a more mainstream effort for Adobe, Ms. Lewnes said, which is also created by Goodby, Silverstein and carries the theme “Adobe &.” To indicate the connection, the campaign carries the theme “Adobe & marketing.”

Rage Against The Machine — NEW ALBUM IN THE WORKS … Maybe

Rage Against The Machine
NEW ALBUM IN THE WORKS!
(Maybe)

 
It's been twelve years since Rage Against the Machine broke up ... but now, the band's bassist is totally hinting to TMZ that the guys are secretly working ON A BRAND NEW ALBUM!!!

Tim Commerford was leaving a cafe in Malibu when we asked if Rage had anything new in the works -- and in a very coy way ... like he really WANTED to tell us something but couldn't ... Tim replied, "Maybe ... maybe."

Of course, a new album would be HUGE -- Rage broke up in 2000 when singer Zack de la Rocha left the band. The remaining members later reformed as Audioslave with singer Chris Cornell, but it just wasn't the same.

As for Commerford's missing tooth -- the bassist says he's now into "removing teeth" ... like, for fun. Watch the video.

Wade Guyton’s Computer-Made Works at the Whitney

“I never really enjoyed drawing or art classes,” said Mr. Guyton unapologetically as he described growing up in a small town in Tennessee. “I would prefer to sit in front of the TV or play video games.”

On a steamy morning a few weeks earlier, Mr. Guyton, 40, wearing shorts, a black T-shirt and sneakers, was anxiously watching while a work of red and green stripes slowly chugged out of the printer, spilling onto the floor. The repetitive pattern was not being printed on paper, but on linen that the artist imported from France because he liked its smooth surface.

Mr. Guyton had found the striped image on an end paper in a book and he tore it out and scanned it. He saw the book “sitting open on a pile of stuff and was attracted to the pattern,” Mr. Guyton recalled, adding: “They are weird Christmas colors yet there’s an optical buzz to it. It’s interesting for me to take something so insignificant and minor and affectless on its own and let it permeate in many different ways.”

He elongated the image on his computer and what was now printing out before him had a kind of pattern of Benday dots, reminiscent of something Roy Lichtenstein would have made had he created abstract paintings.

Less than a decade ago Mr. Guyton couldn’t get a dealer to pay attention to him. Now he is represented by the Friedrich Petzel Gallery in Chelsea, and has well-known collectors avidly buying his art, examples of which are already in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, to name a few. Starting Thursday Mr. Guyton’s work will be the focus of a midcareer survey at the Whitney Museum of American Art called “Wade Guyton OS,” with OS standing for operating system, the software that supports a computer’s basic user functions.

Along with artists like Kelley Walker (a friend with whom he often collaborates), Seth Price and Tauba Auerbach, Mr. Guyton is at the forefront of a generation that has been reconsidering both appropriation and abstract art through the 21st-century lens of technology.

“Wade speaks to the way images travel across our visual culture — on our computers and iPhones, televisions and books,” said Scott Rothkopf, the Whitney curator who organized the show. “He has figured out a way to make work that deals with technology but doesn’t feel tricky or techie, rather it’s intuitive. It’s abstract on one hand and Pop on the other.”

It was Warhol, after all, who said: “Paintings are too hard. The things I want to show are mechanical. Machines have less problems.” And today artists as varied as Cindy Sherman, Jeff Koons and even the 80-year-old German painter Gerhard Richter are producing paintings with computers.

The Los Angeles artist Mark Grotjahn recalls seeing Mr. Guyton’s first show in New York six years ago. “I was blown away,” he said. “I must have gone back three or four times. I particularly admire the way he repeats motifs with just the slightest changes.”

The paintings that particularly seduced Mr. Grotjahn were what Mr. Guyton calls his flame paintings — black canvases with a menacing-looking flame shooting up from the bottom (again, something the artist ripped out of a book and scanned). Many of the flame paintings also have the letter U in them.

That letter came from his computer keyboard — typing is another way Mr. Guyton makes paintings. On a wall of his studio are canvases with giant X’s on them. On the floor nearby is a gleaming, stainless steel sculpture in the shape of a U — both morphed from letters he had typed and then played with. Ann Temkin, the chief curator of painting and sculpture at the Museum of Modern Art, explained her early fascination with Mr. Guyton’s work.

“You tap a keyboard with one finger and this very large painting emerges,” she said. “It’s gone against everything we think of as a painting.” Yet, Ms. Temkin went on, “there are so many historical landmarks that precede him, so many artists who took the traditional notion of painting in a new direction.”