very day gossip rags and industry newspapers compile pages of information about upcoming releases. Since Hollywood is an industry that thrives on predictability, it’s rare that any one of these news items actually registers as a surprise (Will Smith is set to appear as an action hero? Tom Cruise is going to pretend to be straight? Say it ain’t so!). But every now and then a few announcements slip through that are genuinely unpredictable. Normally this is a sign that the movie in question will be a failure, but every now and then the risks pay off…we’ll have to wait and see what happens with these projects:

Jonah Hill Will Fight Gigantic Robots With Pot Smoke And One-Liners

These ideas are so crazy that they just might work...or fail miserably.

Arguably the two most successful movies of the summer of 2007 amongst teenagers (the sweetest plum of summer movie audiences) were Superbad and Transformers. Obviously studio executives would want to find a way to combine the movies into one gigantic ATM machine. I mean, that just makes sense, right? Well, Michael Bay—the most commercial of mainstream filmmakers—has found a way to make it possible. Bay is trying to cast Superbad star Jonah Hill as Shia LeBeouf’s college roommate in Transformers 2. While there’s no denying that Hill is one of the funniest damn people in Hollywood these days, he certainly seems like an odd choice. Hill thrives on comedy derived from laidback, improvised dialogue, which would be completely out of place in the unrelenting speed and action that defines a Michael Bay movie (Remember Anthony Anderson in the first Transformers? Probably not because he suffered from the exact same problem). That said, Bay’s movies tend to have a surprising amount of comedy in them and John Turturro was given the opportunity to be absolutely hilarious in the first entry of this franchise, so maybe Hill will have a chance to crack a few jokes amongst all the vehicular mayhem. Either that or he’ll be as forgettable as Kevin Smith was in Live Free Or Die Hard.

Ang Lee’s Latest Directorial Opus

Ang Lee came to Hollywood in the 1990s with a slew of Chinese character pieces under his belt and slowly became a major player. After a series of impressive but low-key dramas like The Ice Storm, the man took Hollywood by storm with Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragen before becoming the surprise director of an underrated cinematic adaptation of The Hulk, directing the world’s most beloved gay cowboy love story Brokeback Mountain, and finally helming the erotic World War 2 thriller Lust, Caution. Lee is certainly unpredictable, but his lastest film has to be the most surprising choice he’s made yet. Ang Lee intends to direct a comedy about Woodstock. While he has certainly made movies with funny moments, the director has never attempted a full-on comedy before, let alone one about such a specific and infamous moment in U.S. history. Normally foreign directors tackling such identifiably American topics is a bad idea, but Ang Lee did manage to perfectly capture the dissatisfied and disappointed Nixon America of the 1970s in The Ice Storm, so perhaps he can weave that magic again. It’s certainly an odd choice, but that seems to be what fires up Ang Lee’s imagination, so the movie can’t be written off just yet.