According to the Hollywood Reporter, representatives of Sin City creator Frank Miller are shopping the sequel rights around to various producers in Hollywood. The Weinstein Company produced the original film, which grossed $159 million worldwide. A Weinstein rep insisted to THR that the company still owns the rights to a follow-up, but if that's true why would Miller be offering them to someone else?

THR speculates that the Weinsteins either couldn't afford to pay a contractually obligated re-up fee, or simply doesn't have the resources to get the movie off the ground. Traditionally, contracts for sequel rights include a requirement that the option holder—in this case, the Weinsteins—keep the film in active development. If it sits on a shelf because, say, the company can't pony up the cash to hire an A-list screenwriter, then the rights can revert to the original owner.

Asked for comment, a Weinstein Company rep forwarded Gawker the same statement from lawyer Bert Fields that the company issued to THR:

TWC's rights to produce sequels to Sin City remain intact as they always have been. Any suggestion to the contrary is complete hogwash.

A close reading of that statement would allow for it to be narrowly true even if the Weinsteins have lost exclusivity over the film. They may have the right to produce the sequel contingent upon meeting certain development goals, like hiring a writer within a certain timeframe. If they haven't met those goals yet, the rights could still be said to be "intact."

If true, the loss of the Sin City rights would be just the latest sign that the Weinsteins are barely keeping their heads above water. Earlier this month, they settled a lawsuit by paying an "undisclosed sum" to NBC Universal over their attempt to move Project Runway from Bravo to Lifetime. Who knows what that sum was, but NBC had the Weinsteins over a barrel after having successfully won an injunction to stop Runway from airing, so it was likely more than a token fee.

In December, Fidelity Investments marked down its shares in the Weinstein Co. by 25%; a month before that, the company laid of 24 people, or 11% of its staff. The company has quietly laid off other staff since then.

While the Weinsteins have shown some signs of business life recently, such as buying John Lennon biopic Nowhere Boy, they're said to be out of the market for new material such as scripts and book rights. And despite the Weinstein reputation for letting movies sit on the shelf for years, there's even been stories circulating of them offering producers their movies back if they can find someone to pay them whatever TWC has spent so far.

Still, Harvey has his glittery future projects to hold out as argument that turnaround is just up ahead. There's this summer's Inglorious Basterds, whose Cannes premiere was just announced today, and of course, Rob Marshall's musical Nine which Harvey is already positioning for next year's Oscars.

But this is an old trick. The Weinstein Company's CFO crowed in a letter to the New York Times two years ago that the company's 70 percent investment in the home video firm Genius Products was worth $400 million. Last quarter, Genius Products recorded an operating loss of $29 million, and the company that owns the other 30 percent wrote down the value of its share by $35 million, citing an "other than temporary decline" in its worth. In January, the British company Entertainment Rights, which had a contract with Genius Products as a home-video distributor of its films, announced that it wasn't confident that Genius could pay its debts.

So Bad it's Good: The Spirit (Dec. 25). Perhaps it's best to know as little as possible going into this adaptation of Will Eisner's classic 1940s comic series, written and directed by Eisner acolyte Frank Miller in the arresting visual style of his debut (with Robert Rodriguez) Sin City. But the silhouettes, snow and sooty (if green-screened) Central City backdrops are less-convincing a reason to have a look than the gleeful pageantry of Miller's bad taste: The Spirit (Gabriel Macht), essentially a zombie cop turned oversexed masked-vigilante enforcer, introduces himself by way of an epic fight with equally unkillable Central City crime lord The Octopus (Samuel L. Jackson). Mud is thrown, balls are crushed, toilets are slammed, and expectations are dashed. "This," you should expect to mutter to yourself and/or your incredulous date, "is fucking terrible."

Well, kind of. Your first impression — that Miller has no idea what he's doing — eventually surrenders to an intrigue with what he'll do next. Will Scarlett Johansson put her beguiling badness to work as Octopus right-hand Silken Floss, or simply stand around like a line-reading cleavage prop? Will Eva Mendes (as jewel thief Sand Saref) test the PG-13 rating with her de rigeur gratuitous nudity? Will doctor Sarah Paulson ever tire of her male-slut superhero crush? Will Jackson's fat, annoying cloned henchmen ever shut up? And is that actually Sam Jackson up there in Nazi regalia, shouting about eggs?

By the time Miller answers most of these questions, you're already barreling toward The Spirit's climax — a convergence of the hero, villain and their intimates for a hyper-violent This is Your Life variant for the soul of Central City. With spectacle to spare and absolutely no interest in Iron Man's optimism, The Incredible Hulk's self-seriousness or The Dark Knight's social criticism, The Spirit instead emerges as the comics genre's semi-lucid inbred cousin. Hating this movie would be like booing at the Special Olympics.

So Bad it's Bad: Seven Pounds (now playing). At some point one might expect an ebb to the extraordinary critical tsunami that helped devastate Will Smith's morality play. Or at least a backlash of some kind, anything pledging some redeemability to the story of a purported IRS agent making a set of mysterious rounds to help an ensemble of sick, blind and otherwise downtrodden strangers.

Alas, we won't be the ones inaugurating that movement. Seven Pounds is everything its detractors say, with baffling plot contrivances and dramatic ineptitude compounded by the cardinal sin of utter boredom. As Smith's mission crystallizes and his motivations surface — in a twist so random it really does defy spoiling here — the likelihood of any emotional payoff diminishes behind the vast horizon of its star's ego. We imagine Seven Pounds' final 40 minutes may someday acquire some esteem in the Cult-Classic Canon for its adroit interweaving of printing-press repair, bone-marrow transplants, bad sex and killer jellyfish. But for want of anything worthwhile preceding them, it begs the question: If Will Smith falls in the forest and the audience walked out around the one-hour mark, does he make a sound?

So Bad it's Ugly: Revolutionary Road (Dec. 25) . While novelist John Cheever traced the glide path of America's fall from post-WWII euphoria to disillusioned ennui, his contemporary Richard Yates was the black box that captured every primal, panicked cry in the seconds before the crash. Nearly 50 years on, Sam Mendes likely fancies himself to share a little of each man's qualities, with his decade's worth of moodily revisionist entries surveying suburbia (American Beauty), crime and the Depression (Road to Perdition), the first Iraq War (Jarhead) and now Revolutionary Road, Yates's debut novel about an idealistic young couple's suffocation in the Connecticut suburbs.

But Mendes crafted not so much an adaptation here as he did a stunt. It was one thing to reunite wife Kate Winslet and Leonardo DiCaprio, tricking the Titanic generation into a bit of po-mo awards-season whiplash; it was another entirely to impose his semi-literate condescension on Frank and April Wheeler, Yates's doomed ad man and his housewife, whose shared yearning for a life beyond the social constraints of their titular street capsizes in devastating slow-motion. Their unraveling was a symbolic end to the optimism of Eisenhower's '50s, no less nightmarish for its yowling, virtually unprecedented depiction of complacency's costs. It created a stir that never altogether faded, influencing American Beauty itself and prompting no fewer than a dozen failed screen attempts before Mendes and Scott Rudin coaxed around $40 million of DreamWorks' money to smear their quasi-pedigreed patina over the Wheeler family's implosion.

It would have been bad enough with screenwriter Justin Haythe digesting Yates's piercing dialogue into compact, Oscar-clip-compatible bursts. It would have been bad enough with DiCaprio and Winslet, each miscast, delivering those bursts in furrow-browed, you-shout-now-I-shout order. It would have been bad enough with Michael Shannon dropping by as the neighbors' candid loony son, the Connecticut equivalent of Southern dramas' "magical Negro" whose cruelly omniscient nuggets coincide conveniently with key junctures of the Wheelers' dissolution.

But Revolutionary Road's real failure transcends tone-deafness. Here, Mendes actively perverts his source's vanguard qualities — grossly commodifying the Wheelers, fetishizing their anguish, and in fact reveling in the excruciating emotional turmoil that tormented Yates until his death in 1992. We knew Mendes was a bit of a serial masturbator, but a necrophiliac? Moreover, a cold-blooded cultural murderer? Quick — someone save Kate.

Love and Rockets
What's it about? What isn't it about? In one of the first important alternative comics of the 80s, Gilbert and Jaime Hernandez perfected a brand of engaging, sexy, comic family that makes Tyler Perry look like a prop comic. Originally self-published by these two brilliant brothers, Love and Rockets found a niche as an evolving, chaotic work of genius that spans both of the Americas. Choosing one story would be difficult, but the mystery set in the fictional town of Palomar might be the perfect place to start.
Who should star and direct? Even the visual style of the Hernandez brothers fits King of the Hill creator Mike Judge, and instead he is wasting years of his life on movies like the Luke Wilson-Maya Rudolph comedy Idiocracy. Judge is laboring on another television show in the interim, and when he decides to come back to the big screen L & R should be the reason. Casting a bunch of total unknowns for this would be a stroke of genius. My office will bill your office, Mike.

Thunderbolts: Faith In Monsters
What's it about? Prolific comic book scripter Warren Ellis' version of Thunderbolts is the story of a bunch of supervillains forcibly conscripted by the U.S. government to apprehend rogue superheroes. The unlikely and largely unknown team of Swordsman, Venom, Bullseye, Moonstone, Songbird, Penance and Radioactive Man won't win in the name recognition category. The dark and funny concept is the key here, turning the traditional structure of superheroes on their head. Thunderbolts may have to wait until the genre collapses in on itself and is in need of a shake-up.
Who should star and direct? Ellis' group of villains are led by Spiderman's Norman Osborn, and since Willem Dafoe's version of him is relegated to cable, a suitable replacement would be to resurrect the classic performance of Greg Kinnear's Captain Amazing character from Mystery Men as the team leader. I'll also have to see if the guy who directed Clue is still alive, I am imagining a similar comical/scary vibe. Victory! John Landis is still kicking.

Potential
What's it about? By all rights Potential is the way that Juno soundtracker Kimya Dawson should have been widely exposed to the American-moviegoing public. A coming of age story about a young lesbian girl by L Word writer Ariel Schrag, Potential doesn't need the traditional contrivances (pregnancy, wedding, love triangle) to be a uniquely moving story of an unrequited love. May 6 was supposed to mark the move back into print for this astonishing book, but it's already freely available on Amazon again. Potential has the potential to not only be a hilarious journey through adolescence, but a story that actually helps young people find themselves.
Who should star and direct? Since Ellen Page's handlers will be keeping her at least 50 feet away from this project at all times, and time travel isn't available to use a young Natalie Portman as the object of desire, how about Juno co-star Olivia Thirlby? She's naturally funny and winning. I guess Todd Solondz would probably ruin this project, but a more sincere film might challenge his critics and he doesn't appear to be working on anything except his own self-loathing.

Marvel 1602
What's it about? Plans for a Justice League movie have fallen apart out of serious fear about how much money the studio that greenlit this project would be making. In all seriousness, the presence of Superman, Batman and the rest that would require so much star power the production would probably just break down into an extremely competitive circle jerk (2-to-1 odds on Brandon Routh in that one). Instead of having to hire a 16 person continuity commission, they could just go with with this slightly different version of the familiar superheroes of the Marvel Universe. This historically fascinating Neil Gaiman-conceived project is perfect for the big screen, and only requires Nick Fury, the Fantastic Four, the X-Men and Captain America. That's pocket change compared to Batman and Superman.
Who should direct and star? It's no shock Lord Steven Spielberg hasn't jumped on the superhero train, but since Shia LaBoeuf isn't exactly scoring in bars, I could see them teaming up again down the road. (Shia as Captain America? No. Nick Fury? Nooo. Wolverine's little brother Wolvy? Yes.) Unfortunately, Spielberg seems committed to the Abbie Hoffman movie Chicago 7. If he can't get the stars required to make Marvel 1602 happen, no one can.