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At the San Diego Comic Con International, if you're a woman, you're automatically queen of the hop. If you're Mila Kunis, you're Queen of the Universe.
The undeniably cute ex-That '70s Show star -- who's been on a career roll since her romantic lead in Forgetting Sarah Marshall -- had not one, but three booths to work at the most recent edition last month. She was plugging the soon-to-be-released Mike Judge comedy Extract, the upcoming Denzel Washington post-apocalypse movie The Book Of Eli, and of course Family Guy, where she continues to voice the character of Meg.
There, she discovered a "Mila Kunis Lookalike" contest going on.
"And I'm at the Extract booth," she told us, "and I heard about this from Ben Lyons at E! And I was like, 'Word?' And he was like, 'Yeah!' And I was like, 'I'm going to have to go and meet them.'
"That's when I went downstairs to the floor, with my brother who was totally hitting on one of the Mila lookalikes, which was really creepy. She was the short one. There was, like, a giant Mila Kunis lookalike, who was like six feet tall and who didn't really look like me. But hey, she had dark hair.
"And the short one was adorable and super cute. And my brother's like, 'That's the hot one!' And I was like, 'You ... are ... gross.' But he went for it."
TOO GOOD, TOO BAD: The lower the expectations, the better the film. But in the case of James Cameron's Avatar, is the opposite true? As Sam Worthington, who stars in the movie about the colonization of an alien planet, told Sun Media months ago, "Jim said, 'The hype is going to kill it.' "
So maybe it was inevitable that a week after the debut of the trailer -- and "Avatar Day" screened 25 minutes of 3D footage at IMAX theatres across North America -- the interplanetary epic has been brought down to earth.
Online reaction to the trailer is all over the map, but the one thing everyone appears to agree on is that Avatar -- while gorgeous to look at -- isn't the cinematic game-changer people were hoping for. Or as one especially negative fanboy opined, "It's Fern Gully meets Halo."
In fairness, the movie is far more immersive and stunning in 3D than 2D; I was reminded of being thrilled by Beowulf when I saw it in 3D IMAX, then bored by it when I saw it months later on television. But if Avatar hopes to recoup its $230- million budget, it's going to have to play like gangbusters on both 2D and 3D screens. Still, maybe bursting the hype bubble isn't such a bad thing. Remember, the lower the expectations, the better the film.
LEGO MY FRANCHISE: Now that plans are underway for a Lego movie -- because that's what the world has been waiting breathlessly for -- what of He-Man and the Masters of the Universe, based on the Mattel property?
Producer Joel Silver (The Matrix) has been trying to get off the ground for years. "It's a project we're very excited about and we're in development," Silver says. "But we're not there yet." In the meantime, audiences will just have to get satiate their hunger for toy-to-film franchises with -- seriously -- Stretch Armstrong and View Master flicks.