Recycle, it’s good for you: Mr and Mrs Smith, Batman and 24

Mr and Mrs Smith have 24 hours to disable the bomb and catch the villain before Batman comes along and takes matters into his own hands. And where is Jack Bauer? Pop quiz: Is that a prequel to Mr and Mrs Smith, a sequel to Batman, a movie adaptation of 24 or a confused melange of all three?

We’ll start with a step backwards because these days, what comes after a relatively successful movie is a slightly less successful prequel. The format getting the treatment this time is Brad Pitt/Angelina Jolie vehicle Mr and Mrs Smith. Before you begin to display even the faintest signs of excitement, you are bidding on the vehicle alone. Its famous occupants are not included. Oh, and neither is the title. The pseudo-prequel will be titled Mr and Mrs Jones.

In 2007 Martin Henderson and Jordana Brewster stepped into Brad and Angelina’s shoes for an attempt at making the film into a TV series. But it turned out that the shoes were far too big and the proposed show didn’t make it further than a pilot. If at first you don’t succeed try, try again (and again). You can understand the annoyance of execs: here they have a great format that made plenty of loot first time around ($478 million on a budget of $110m) and for the life of them, they can’t figure out what to do with it. Lord knows they can’t just face facts: that it was a generic concept made thrilling to the masses by the pairing of legendary lookers Pitt and Jolie (who helpfully went on to have a tabloid-friendly romance that scooped all kinds of free publicity). Really, the upcoming Euro-thriller The Tourist has more in common with the original Mr and Mrs Smith as people will be interested to see how Jolie and Johnny Depp measure up against one another. But why let common sense get in the way of a cold corpse revival? Mr and Mrs Jones will be an origin story of a similar pair of assassin/spies who are set up as a fake married couple after they complete their training. The fact that the original Mr and Mrs Smith were a genuinely married couple who each had no idea of their spouse’s day job and therefore the link between the two projects is even more tenuous is neither here nor there.

We can see where this is going already: a fake married couple who don’t like each other but have to keep up appearances, argue and face job-related problems but against the odds end up falling in love. And maybe they throw a spanner in the works by making life difficult for their bosses. That’ll get the audiences queuing round the block.

I guess some questions that have to be asked are: how long until they break out into song (“Meeeeeeeeeee aaaand Mrs, Mrs Jones…”), and will the couple cast in the prequel be the next Brangelina?

Quick, back into the Dolorian, put your foot down and get to 88mph so we can get back to the future! Phew, we made it. But wait, oh no, what do we have now? Another sequel? For Batman? This will be the third instalment of Christopher Nolan’s Batman franchise (making it the equivalent to Batman Forever, which is only one step away from Batman & Robin, gasp!).

Although no hard evidence is available, it seems that all the pieces are in place: David S Goyer announced that he was leaving the ABC show FlashForward which frees him up to continue writing for the Batman franchise (after having co-written Batman Begins and The Dark Knight) and Nolan’s Inception is in post-production now, which will leave him open too. All that’s left now is character and casting speculation so get ready for every zeitgeisty name in Hollywood to be linked to one of the Batverse’s femmes fatales or villains. As a time-saver, you could just pick actor and character names out of a hat and start your own rumours: Zoe Saldana for Catwoman!

Did we change the past and create an alternate future or is that just déjà vu? The real- time, action thriller TV series 24 is to be adapted into a movie. Jack Bauer is going to Europe via Billy Ray’s (Source Code, State of Play, Breach) pen and thanks to Fox’s film and television divisions finally coming together.

The TV series is currently airing its eighth season with this week’s sweeps ratings determining whether or not the show will get a ninth (rumour has it that audience numbers have been affected by box-set culture: fans not watching the show until it comes out on DVD). If it does, the movie adaptation will have to go on hold but if it’s cancelled 24 will say hello to the big screen.

The show’s hook is that each season of 24 spans a 24-hour period in Jack Bauer’s life as he fights terrorist threats for the US government (and according to political pundits, historically helped to create a sympathetic environment among US voters for extreme interrogation techniques) and each episode is a real-time hour (with the ad breaks). How they’ll retain this hook over an hour and a half is not clear but it won’t be the first feature-length 24: to bridge the gap between seasons six and seven a made-for-TV adventure saw Bauer fighting African armies.