Entertainment

Well, despite what you're thinking Affleck's directing career—THE TOWN and GONE BABY GONE—is much admired within the halls of Warners. So much so that they are thinking of giving over the proposed Justice League film to Affleck. After all, he played a superhero once. He also knows Kevin Smith personally.

Realizing it is never too soon to start a preemptive strike, the Outhousers website has already started a much-needed campaign to save Joss Whedon's...

On the scale of "Oh thank God," this ranks pretty high.Joss Whedon will be back to write and direct AVENGERS 2, as Disney CEO Bob Iger told an investors call. Immediately after the announcement, people started throwing money directly at Iger, just pelting him with dollars and quarters. "Take our money!" they cried. "Just take it! THE AVENGERS has already made $1.5 billion worldwide and the sequel will make even more."

In an interesting move, it looks like Marvel might extend 20th Century's 'Daredevil' contract... on the condition that Fox return certain Fantastic Four characters back to them.

Some set pics of Hugh Jackman from WOLVERINE II, currently known as THE WOLVERINE, which is set in Japan. From these photos, we can assume that in the story, Jackman's Wolverine character will have a period of extreme self doubt, which evolves into self neglect, from which he will be rescued by a period of intense study of Zen Buddhist philosophy and Japanese fighting techniques.

The Fantasy Economy continues, with a record comics auction at Heritage, and an amazing array of Hollywood memorabilia from Profiles in History!

In another relatively quiet weekend at the Box Office, we find Batman continuing to lord over the competition in a similar fashion to Avengers, we also see a genre film launch and hear a "thud" as it hits a wall, just like Battleship didn't bouncing off the Avengers.

And you thought comics had it bad. It's been a banner year for video game sexual harassment—or at least video game sexual harassment awareness. The Anita Sarkeesian Kickstarter and subsequent online abuse has been well documented, and it's been discussed so much that the Times is ON it with a piece that nonetheless serves as a good round-up. This is the last frontier, as anonymity and youth add up to a culture of harassment—which spills over into the real world as when a female gamer was harassed by the captain of her own team IRL (above.) The Times says it's gone so far even video game makers are trying to do something:

Thor has found a villain and he's the king of the elves! What is this mysterious Avengers spin-off that Disney is kicking around? And what's this about a Prometheus SEQUEL?

And here it is. DALEKS.

While you may not be interested in sporting events, the history of Olympic Mascots ties into such familiar Beat territory as licensing and furries. According to the Smithsonian , the Germans, who innovated the pictographs we spotlighted earlier, also invented the Olympic mascot with Wendi, a lovable dachshund who introduced the 1972 Summer games in Munich. It was only the beginning of a parade of characters hated and loved, but most often hated.

-- SUPERMAN RETURNS star Brandon Routh on his new role in Partners, a new CBS sitcom about hilariously mismatched roomates, one gay one straight. Routh actually plays the wacky neighbor as near as we can make out.