We’ve seen warring volcano movies, giant meteor flicks and Capote biopics, but nothing can prepare you for the drama of Gods vs. Titans! War of the Gods is set to start shooting in February for Relativity, while Clash of the Titans is slated for a April launch at Warner Bros. “Both are sub-$100 million projects, though the budget for Gods, at approximately $85 million, is believed to be higher than Titans, which is closer to the $70 million range. The studios have been in a fierce battle to get their product to market first, in a battle echoing the scramble between competing studio projects Troy and Alexander in 2004,” according to The Hollywood Reporter.

Sylvester Stallone has written and will star in The Expendables, which “follows a team of mercenaries on a mission to overthrow a South American dictator,” per Variety.

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You really have to hand it to Oliver Stone; whatever you might think of the quality of his movies, he sure does know how to rile people. He virtually invented Vietnam revisionism with Platoon, pissing off all the people who wanted to buy into the Rambo vision of a mighty America sold out by craven politicians; he irritated pretty much everybody with JFK and was practically elevated to Satanhood with Natural Born Killers; he drove conservatives batty with his sympathetic portrayal of Fidel Castro in Comandante; and his World Trade Center irked people of every political stripe. After returning to Vietnam for Pinkville (a dramatic retelling of the My Lai massacre), his next rumored project will be a documentary biography, in the Comandante mode, of the hugely controversial Iranian president Ahmadinejad. It’s a move likely to enrage conservatives in the U.S., but right-wingers in Iran are already furious — they’ve hated Stone since he directed Alexander, a film about the Macedonian emperor who is reviled by Persians as a hated conquerer. As the Guardian reports, conservative newspapers in Tehran are already going buggy at the idea of their beloved leader being immortalized on film by a man who already directed The Doors, a film about "one of America's perverted and half-mad singers; someone who urinated on the head of his fans during his concerts and enjoyed doing so." (The article also provides a helpful side-by-side comparison of the careers of Ahmadindejad and Jim Morrison.) — Leonard Pierce