Legendary Pictures has secured the rights to turn the incredible science fiction video game Mass Effect into a feature-length movie. The banner has previously delivered us great titles like 300, The Dark Knight, Watchmen, The Hangover, and Where the Wild Things Are…among many others.

Avi Arad and Ari Arad will produce the film, and Mark Protosevich is currently in talks to pen the screenplay. Protosevich has previously written The Cell, Poseidon, I Am Legend, and helped to write Marvel Studios’ Thor.

A new movie based on the Japanese manga franchise Ghost in the Shell has been talked about for a while now, but it appears that DreamWorks is ready to give it another big go. It has been announced that Laeta Kalogridis has been hired to write the script, and that the live-action movie will be filmed entirely in 3-D with Avi Arad, Ari Arad among the producers.

Ghost in the Shell is a highly-futuristic story about a cyborg named Motoko Kusanagi who works for a Japanese Public Safety division known as Section 9. She is almost completely composed of mechanical components with only her brain remaining organic. The title is something of an allegorical reference to whether her soul (ghost) exists within her shell of a synthetic body — Motoko often even wonders if her memories are also manufactured and nothing about her is real. The character has been used in many different ways, so it’s not known if DreamWorks plans to create their own story based on the manga or if they may remake one of the pre-existing anime movies.

Kyle Ward, who wrote the script for the Kane & Lynch movie, and was just reported to be writing the sequel to Hitman, has now been given a third video game movie writing job: Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune.

The popular Playstation 3 game from Sony Computer Entertainment is being developed into a movie by Columbia Pictures, with Marvel Studios founder Avi Arad and his brother Ari Arad‘s Arad Productions producing the movie. Also producing will be Charles Roven and Alex Gartner of Atlas Entertainment.

Drake’s Fortune tells the story of Nathan Drake, an adventurer and descendant of actual explorer Sir Francis Drake, who discovers a diary by his late ancestor that leads the way to the fabled city of gold: El Dorado. As usual, when trying to discover some of the universe’s greatest treasures, things don’t go so well; between rival seekers of the gold city and mutated descendants of Spaniards and Nazis trying to stop him, Nathan Drake is obviously in for a challenge and a kick-ass adventure.