Yesterday we got a double dose of The Adventures of Tintin with international and domestic posters.  Today brings the first look at actual footage from Steven Spielberg's The Adventures of Tintin: The Secret of the Unicorn, as the official teaser trailer has made its debut.  And teaser is the appropriate word.  Mostly, it's confined to looks at the film's lavishly realized digital environments, with fleeting glimpses at the motion-capture characters.  There's only one solid look at the face of Herge's famous creation, whose physical performance and voice are provided by Jamie Bell.  Don't you want to see what a Spielberg-directed motion-capture adventure looks like?

Tintin, Herge's comic creation dating back to 1929, never really caught on here in the States, but the plucky, globe-trotting investigator and his dog Snowy are incredibly popular damn near everywhere else in the world.  For Tintin's first big cinematic outing, Steven Spielberg and Peter Jackson teamed up for not one, but two motion-capture epics.  The first, The Adventures of Tintin: The Secret of the Unicorn, is directed by Spielberg and set for a December 23rd release in America, and a month or two earlier in most other territories.  The first teaser poster for the film debuted today, so take a look and get a feel for Spielberg's animated take on Herge's boy wonder.

The James Bond franchise has long been home to some blatant product placement, since the debonair superspy sporting any product automatically marks said product as the pinnacle of sexiness, class, and high-tech refinement.  While Casino Royale may have stripped down the plotting and style of the series, the Daniel Craig era is still one of pervasive plugging. Craig's next outing, the as-yet untitled Bond 23, will set an all-time product placement record, with 1/3 of the total budget coming from onscreen advertising.

The marketing for Jon Favreau's Cowboys & Aliens has been nothing if not confident.  The latest trailer, which features far more footage than we've been privy to, practically struts through two and a half minutes.  Even though the trailer does contain a whole lot spectacle, Favreau and Co. are smartly holding back, focusing on one or two action sequences and teasing the aliens themselves, all while accentuating the serious Western element.  Check out Daniel Craig as a gunslinger with deadly alien hardware strapped to his wrist in the trailer right here, or in HD at Apple.

After getting its financial dealings all straightened out MGM starting shopping several of its properties around to studios for co-financing and distribution.  The most notable of these titles is, of course, the twenty-third installment of the James Bond franchise, directed by Sam Mendes and once again starring Daniel Craig.  Sony was the most likely candidate to distribute Bond 23, as the studio did the same for Casino Royale and Quantum of Solace.  Now it's official.  Sony Picture will co-finance and distribute not just Bond 23, but Bond 24 as well, meaning that the world's foremost secret agent will continue using quality Sony products. 

Back in 2007, there simply wasn't much anticipation for Iron Man.  At the time, most folks thought Marvel was bringing up its B-team of less popular characters for the first film from then-newly formed Marvel Studios.  When director Jon Favreau showed footage of the film at Comic-Con that summer, however,  Iron Man suddenly looked pretty damn cool.  In 2009, Favreau again sent heads spinning with action-packed clips from the sequel.  It's no surprise, then, that Favreau impressed at this weekend's WonderCon, where he showed nine minutes of Cowboys & Aliens, his upcoming action film starring Daniel Craig and Harrison Ford.

San Diego Comic-Con may be geek mecca, drawing more than 100,000 fans from around the world to Southern California every July, but WonderCon, Comic-Con's neighbor, is growing more popular every year.  Last year, the convention saw a spike of nearly 10,000 additional attendees, and given the comic and fantasy gathering's prime position just before summer, WonderCon is attracting increased presence from the genre-friendly film properties that now dominate Comic-Con. This weekend's WonderCon will include panels with Ryan Reynolds on Green Lantern, Jon Favreau talking up Cowboys and Aliens, and newly minted Superman Henry Cavill on Tarsem Singh's upcoming fantasy epic Immortals.

Noomi Rapace, who played the title character in the Swedish adaptation of the late Stieg Larsson's insanely popular novel The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo and its sequels, delivered a performance that will be difficult to top.  That said, I like the look of Rooney Mara as the Americanized Lisbeth Salander, precisely because she's not what I expected.  Mara previously appeared in The Social Network for Dragon Tattoo director David Fincher, but that character bore very little resemblance to Salander.  Just take a look at these new set photos of Mara in costume, as well as one of her costar Daniel Craig, who plays journalist Mikael Blomkvist.

Though MGM's financial woes have kept James Bond sidelined since 2008's Quantum of Solace, the studio is now solvent and moving ahead with pre-production on the 23rd adventure of 007, once again starring James Bond as everybody's favorite secret agent.  We know that the release date is set for November 9th, 2012, and thanks to Judi Dench, we now know that the film is scheduled to commence production in November.

Fifteen years ago, buxom archeologist and adventurer Lara Croft made her heavily-pixellated debut on Sony's original Playstation console.  The voluptuous, hot-pants-wearing, dual pistol-wielding spelunker turned Tomb Raider into a surprisingly resilient pop-cultural franchise, with a whole mess of subsequent videogames and two movies, Lara Croft: Tomb Raider and the clumsily titled Lara Croft Tomb Raider: The Cradle of Life.  Those two films, though never particularly popular with critics or audiences, managed to earn $432 million globally, due largely to the presence of Angelina Jolie in short shorts.  Well, GK Films is putting those hot pants back in action, with a Jolie-less Tomb Raider reboot that they're hoping to have in theaters by 2013.