Sci Fi

Often film sequels are slam dunks at the box office, a seamless continuation from where a previous hit left off. But as the new installment of the 15-year-old franchise "Men in Black" proves, getting to the big screen isn't always a cakewalk. One of the most troubled productions in recent Hollywood memory, Sony Pictures' latest movie in the Will Smith-Tommy Lee Jones sci-fi-comedy franchise encountered multiple script rewrites, a discontented star and a three-month production shutdown as writers and studio executives scrambled to fix a project that nearly fell apart . By the time it was over, the studio had run up a tab of nearly $250 million - making "Men in Black 3" one of the most expensive releases of the summer.

NBC evidently believes laughter is the best medicine: The struggling network will have a strong dose of comedy on four nights in its fall lineup plus the Season 3 return of"The Voice. " Keeping its Thursday sitcom block essentially intact with existing series, NBC will push the low-rated comedies"Community"and"Whitney"to Fridays and open up Tuesdays and Wednesdays for new sitcoms such as "Go On," "Animal Practice" and "Guys With Kids. " Nearly one-quarter of NBC's fall prime-time schedule will consist of sitcoms; last fall, the figure was just 14%. Also on the schedule: the Monday one-hour series "Revolution," the new sci-fi drama from producer J.J. Abrams, and, for Wednesday, "Chicago Fire," from "Law & Order" mastermind Dick Wolf.

The Sci Fi Channel has pulled the plug on "Stargate SG-1," but there still might be life ahead for the series. Sci Fi said it would not order further episodes of the show, now in its 10th season. The cable channel, however, has booked a fourth season of "Stargate: Atlantis," a spinoff that premiered in 2004. The final 10 episodes of "Stargate SG-1," which logged its 200th episode Friday, will air next year on Sci Fi. MGM, which produces the show, is hoping to dock it on another channel.

Cinder A Novel Marissa Meyer Feiwel and Friends: 390 pp., $17.99, ages 12 and older Few fairy tales have been as endlessly reimagined and riffed upon as Cinderella. The beloved rags-to-riches story of an oppressed beauty whose kind nature is rewarded with the rare happily-ever-after ending has been turned into countless movies, ballets, books - even an ice show. Now it's getting a feminist, futuristic makeover in Marissa Meyer's terrific young-adult debut, "Cinder," the kickoff to the four-book Lunar Chronicles series that will incorporate fellow fairy-tale heroines Little Red Riding Hood, Rapunzel and Snow White.

Vivendi Universal's Sci Fi Channel will pull movies starring actor Arnold Schwarzenegger until after his Oct. 7 bid to become California's next governor, the channel said Thursday. Sci Fi's move comes one day after FX, owned by News Corp., decided to take Schwarzenegger movies off the air until after the election, and as other cable channels mulled over whether they should follow suit.

Can two alien cultures coexist in one writers room? Sci Fi is entering a brave new world by teaming television writers with video-game designers to create a franchise that is both a television series and a massive multiplayer game on the Internet -- more than that, the fans who play the game will actually help shape the show's story arc with their virtual exploits.

With his new film "The Village" coming out, filmmaker M. Night Shyamalan and the Sci Fi Channel may have hoped to create the type of unconventional marketing stunts that made "The Blair Witch Project" a phenomenon five years ago. Instead, the cable network has been forced to admit that the "unauthorized documentary" it aired Sunday night on Shyamalan's "buried secret" was part of an elaborate hoax gone awry.

For a while, things looked iffy for "Battlestar Galactica." After the Sci Fi Channel last month moved the third-season drama about a human resistance movement against an occupying race of robots from Friday nights to Sunday nights in an attempt to goose ratings, viewership remained stagnant. The network has ruled, however, that the show won't live by numbers alone: The Sci Fi Channel is expected to announce today that it has renewed the series for a fourth season.

The end is in sight for "Battlestar Galactica" and the beleaguered humans of the 12 Twelve Colonies aren't the only ones fretting about their survival -- there are also the executives at Sci Fi, the cable channel that has ridden "Galactica" as its esteemed flagship, who will now have to carry on without her. The final 10 episodes of "Battlestar" begin Jan.

Like a grandparent's birthday, the Sci Fi Channel's fourth season finale for "Doctor Who" reeled back in its children. Characters from the cult hit show's two BBC spinoffs, "Torchwood" and "The Sarah Jane Adventures," pitched in to help the Doctor (well, two-and-a-half Doctors, really! Long story!) save the whole universe from certain doom.

Every year at this time, a terribly old yet terrifically youthful supernatural being drops in from out of the sky. I speak of course of the Doctor, as in "Doctor Who," whose annual Christmas special premieres Sunday — Christmas itself! — on BBC America. In Great Britain, this event amounts to a national tradition; but for followers here, it is no less of a calendar moment, a candle in winter coming months after the end of the last season and months before the beginning of the next, when the days are actually at their darkest.

Planesrunner A novel Ian McDonald Prometheus Books: 269 pp.: $16.95, for ages 12 and older It's an alluring idea that somewhere, somehow there's an alternate version of the life you're currently living. It might be better. It could be far worse. But if it exists, and it's possible to get there, why not at least visit? That's the basic idea at the center of "Planesrunner," the first book in the Everness series and the young-adult debut from award-winning sci-fi novelist Ian McDonald.

Plot outline for a Philip K. Dick story: Hollywood buys film rights to obscure short story by famous author. Makes movie. Movie makes money. Producers then claim they never needed to buy rights in the first place. Demand their money back. Emblematic Philip K. Dick story elements: Attempt to turn back time and murkiness of reality. Extra mind-bending plot twist: Author of original story is named Philip K. Dick. As Laura Dick Coelho, one of the late author's daughters, told me: "Everything in the Philip K. Dick world is complicated.

You may not have seen "Idiocracy," the 2006 sci-fi comedy set in an utterly dysfunctional nation 500 years in the future, but chances are you've heard it mentioned lately. References to the film seem to be everywhere, and not just in op-eds penned by cranky columnists (I mentioned it in a column last year about public spaces being sold as advertising space). The latest issue of the Economist has an article about the business-sabotaging effects of the battles in Washington, headlined "American Idiocracy.

Long before such filmmakers as Michael Mann and Martin Scorsese and Todd Haynes began shifting between theatrical features and work made for television, Germany's Rainer Werner Fassbinder was crafting groundbreaking TV with projects including his epic 1980 miniseries "Berlin Alexanderplatz. " Another of his made-for-TV films, 1973's two-part, 3 1/2-hour science-fiction head-spinner "World on a Wire," is enjoying a resurgent wave of interest. The film had been more or less lost to audiences after its initial German broadcast because of issues with the underlying literary rights, but a new restoration is finally making "World on a Wire" accessible to a generation of enthusiastic cinéastes . Based on the novel "Simulacron 3" by Daniel F. Galouye and co-written by Fassbinder and Fritz Müller-Scherz, the film is part detective thriller, part deconstruction of personal identity and part futuristic fortune-telling.

"Cowboys & Aliens" may have won the weekend box-office horse race by a nose, but it will have a tough time being a financial winner for its many studio backers. After what appeared at first to be an unusual tie with "The Smurfs," a kids' cartoon adaptation, the Jon Favreau-directed sci-fi western pulled ahead by $800,000 when final results were tallied Monday. The movie, which stars Daniel Craig and Harrison Ford, took in $36.4 million while "Smurfs" ended up with $35.6 million.

Jason Hawes and Grant Wilson are two blue-collar buddies who work as plumbers for Roto-Rooter in Warwick, R.I. But if there's something strange in your neighborhood, they're the people to call to investigate whether that house, museum, prison, ship, lighthouse, hotel or castle is haunted. They have also become the most unlikely TV stars.

"We made this thing called ... hang on," executive producer and writer David Kemper says. "I always get it wrong. 'Fire Escape?' It stars Benji something." In case you can't guess from Kemper's attitude, the mood is pretty easygoing among the cast and crew of "Farscape" (he was close), the outer-space saga that was supposed to be dead.

In "Attack the Block," the feature writing and directing debut of British comedian Joe Cornish, an alien invasion occurs in a London public housing complex, and only a group of teenagers seems to notice. Pulsing with a rowdy energy, the film works as both a sci-fi horror flick and a teen adventure film. The greatest turn that Cornish pulls off is opening the movie with his protagonists mugging a woman (Jodie Whittaker) and still somehow making them seem, as the story unfolds, worth getting to know (while never excusing their nascent thuggery)