Director Joe Johnston may be having a torrid time of late searching for his perfect Steve Rogers AKA Captain America, with latest reports linking Chris Evans (Fantastic Four) to the role, but that hasn‘t completely deterred him from casting the First Avenger pic. Johnston has gone back to his Wolfman well and snapped up Hugo Weaving (he played Aberline in the hirsute horror). The Matrix and Lord of The Rings star will be lending his distinctive features to the role of uber baddie Red Skull – a Nazi megalomaniac with one hell of a grudge against Cap.

Otherwise known as Johann Shmidt, Red Skull is pretty much the ‘twisted‘ version of Steve Rogers‘ super soldier and has been a mainstay of the Marvel character since the beginning. Johnston is clearly hedging his bets with this one and looking to get the fans on board quickly with a tried and tested storyline.

It‘s an ongoing worry, really. What will we do if our mechanic creations decide to turn on their masters and attempt to eradicate mankind? If you let it, it will keep you up at night…that and the memory of Terminator Salvation. One man certainly plagued by these thoughts is Daniel H. Wilson, author of such go–to–guides as How To Survive a Robot Uprising: Tips on Defending Yourself Against the Coming Rebellion and a bona fide big brain on robotics and artificial intelligence. His unpublished manuscript, simply dubbed Robopocalypse, has been snapped up by DreamWorks and Doubleday with Cloverfield scribe Drew Goddard hired to adapt for the big screen.

So, we can expect to see our evil robo kinsmen back on the screen sooner rather than later and Robopocalypse, seen as a darker, alternate reality tale, should at least help make up for Transformers: Revenge of The Fallen and its Razzie–baiting antics.

Robopocalypse is already garnering great interest with Steven Spielberg circling the project as his next directorial gig. Could Spielberg be about to make a grand return to the sci–fi adventure scene that served him so well on Minority Report?