Media Hijinks - Crazy People, Theme Parks and More TV

The biggest piece of news floating around the industry this week is, by far, the announced retirement of Shia LaBeouf.  If you’ve been paying attention to the news even the slightest bit, you may have seen all the stink surrounding the actor over the last month or so.  He got caught plagiarizing someone’s comic and turning it into his own movie without any sort of credit to the owner.  He then made several apologies, but he plagiarized those as well, stealing from popular celebrities saying their own “sorrys” for their own indiscretions.  The entire thing has been escalating and is now in the hands of the lawyers, though LaBeouf claims that no one should be allowed to have rights to their own creations.  Say what?  Well, maybe this will all go away, for the Transformers star recently twittered a message saying that he is retiring from public life.  While I couldn’t say whether LaBeouf has been trying to pull some sort of Andy Kaufman-esque stunt with all this or whether he’s genuinely nuts, I do have to express my joy that he will now be gone.  Or at least until he decides to do something else idiotic and make some more headlines.

Next up, theme park wars!  Well, new theme parks coming, at least.  The first is AvatarLand, the Pandora-themed park that will become a part of Disney’s property in Orlando, Florida.  It’s been in the works for a while and the other day they finally broke ground on it.  Don’t paint yourself blue and run to Florida just yet, however, since it will take some time for them to actually complete it - until 2017, in fact.

Another theme park, sort of, is the almost finished Marvel Experience.  The difference between this one and your typical theme park is that The Marvel Experience will be on the road.  They have two giant domes that they’ll be lugging from place to place, along with rides, shows, events, shops and plenty of other ways to get you to spend all your money.  It starts up sometime next year, though touring schedules are currently unknown.  For more information on The Marvel Experience, you can head to their website.

Third on the list, great news for fans of Sherlock.  The final episode of season 3 is airing this Sunday in the UK, with the entire series starting up in about a week for the US.  But Sherlock’s seasons are tiny, being just three episodes, each about an hour-and-a-half in length.  Still, it’s enormously popular (and for good reason), so they’ve already signed on for both a fourth and a fifth season.  No word on when they’ll begin shooting or when the new seasons are expected to air, but hopefully they’ll be able to get them out in less than two years this time around.

And one final bit of news - Game of Thrones season 4 has an official air date.  You can tune in to see the post-Red Wedding antics of all your favorite half-naked characters come April 6^th.  So go ahead and add that to the list I gave you a couple of weeks ago.  Luckily, most of the other shows will be done with their run by then, so we all may actually have time to watch GoT.

Until next week, try not to steal other people’s ideas and claim them as your own, for you may end up going completely nuts and getting ostracized by the world.

Photo Credits -

Shia LaBeouf courtesy of badhaven.com