Daft Punk is playing at your house, your house, because Random Access Memories is now streaming free on iTunes. The duo will launch their album this Friday at the Wee Waa festival remotely, possibly via hologram. How robotic.

On Wednesday, we pointed your attention to reports of renewed, possibly contentious negotiations between Robert Downey Jr. and the good-but-stingy folks at Marvel over future Iron Man and Avengers sequels. Today, more Marvel inside baseball, this time volunteered freely via Avengers lord of the realm Joss Whedon.

See, during the chatter about Downey's paychecks, as well as the paychecks for his superhero friends, the number $100 million was thrown out for Joss. As in, $100 million to make another Avengers. $100 million?! For the guy who can barely keep a show on the air for more than a season?!! No, you're right, it was too good to be true. And Joss himself set the record straight, in his trademark cheeky manner. From his comment on the site Whedonesque (via EW):

The Hangover Part III (May 24)

Silver: Because of its blatant recycling of plot points and gags, at one point I considered The Hangover Part II one of the biggest wasted opportunities to hit the big screen. But I’m not gonna lie, I’ve warmed up to it quite a bit. After subsequent (and multiple) cable viewings, I’ve come around and really appreciate Stu’s “there’s a demon in me” story line. It’s a disturbing yet oddly moving comment on the mental state of these three shallow, weak-minded men. More than this, as deplorable as they are, I’ve grown to genuinely like hanging out with these guys. So, like re-watching Inception or Prometheus, with expectations properly set the second time around, I'm at the point where I can also sit back and enjoy The Hangover Part II for what it is. Each time I see the film my enjoyment from spending time with Phil, Stu, and Alan slowly weakens my initial disappointment.

So without even seeing a frame of footage, my enthusiasm for Part III starts with my desire to simply hang with the wolfpack again. Then came this highly entertaining trailer, chock full of mayhem, laughs, and glimpses at a killer supporting cast (John Goodman, Melissa McCarthy, and our returning champions Heather Graham and Ken Jeong). Todd Phillips and his gang of merry men and women look determined to deliver a very different and fresh adventure to cap off this trilogy. I can’t wait.

Someone is always mad on the Internet, but this week has been quite a doozy. First we had Nate Thayer versus The Atlantic, a contentious back-and-forth about freelance payment and digital publishing that launched roughly 5 trillion think pieces across the web. Then there was this very! long! rant from the director of the faux-documentary The Upper Footage, in which he chronicles his attempt to hoodwink audiences into believing that the events depicted in the movie were real as well as his subsequent feud with the film's lead and her "famous actor/actress" parent. Everyone is "infuriated" and "disgusted" and "dead broke" and unable to feed their children or wash their faces with money. The world is in shambles. Gordon Ramsay has "two shit dads." How can I link dump at a time like this?

"You know, like a lot of liberal Americans, I was excited when Barack Obama took office four years ago. But it's a very different world now. And Mitt Romney is a very different candidate. One with the vision and determination to cut through business-as-usual politics and finally put this country back on the path to the zombie apocalypse."

Whatever your political leanings, you have to admit: The whole time Joss Whedon was delivering that speech, you kept a laser focus on that window behind him, expecting to see the beginning of the zombie invasion, didn't you? Or was that just us? Alas, the few glimpses of what we thought might be "walkers" seem to be regular old "pedestrians." Maybe that's what we'll end up calling them if things break the way Whedon describes. Especially if we get the "old-school, shambling kind." And if the apocalypse begins in L.A., the way we've always hoped.

If you are, somehow, not one of the $1.5 billion worth of people that made up The Avengers audience this summer, you may want to avert your eyes from these spoilers. For the rest of you: Hey, remember Agent Coulson? The straight-laced but still kind of badass S.H.I.E.L.D. bureaucrat played by Clark Gregg? The guy whose brutal death at the hands of Loki united the bickering Avengers when nothing else could, because he used to collect their trading cards and that used to mean something in this country, or something? Well, he's not dead anymore. Yep, he got shot up by all kinds of secretive high-tech government weaponry. But nope, not dead anymore.

Next week, once the barbecues, boat shoes, and Breaking Bad have been safely packed away for another season, the pop cultural apparatus — yours truly included — will pivot to focus on the annual parade of hope and hype known as fall television. With great fanfare, the traditional broadcast networks will unveil their fresh product to the skeptical masses. Features will be dutifully written on stars both new and returning, wildly optimistic predictions will be made, misgivings will be muted, bets will be hedged. But with the hot sun still shining and most of Hollywood still on vacation, here’s a hard truth: Most of the new shows being debuted in September are lousy. And, like alopecia-stricken bears, precious few of them will survive the winter.

The Avengers Blu-ray is coming, and they've released this clip of the film's alternate opening to whet the appetite of those action-starved Whedonites eager to set out on one more mission with Cap, Thor, Hulk, and the boyz. While this certainly would've been a darker way to kick things off, the clip's not without a much-needed moment of levity; when Tony Stark wanders through the background of the last few frames, absently kicking at some smoldering rubble as he snacks on some delicious shawarma, that's a moment of clever foreshadowing that would have paid off big time 140 exhilarating, harrowing minutes down the line.

[Yahoo via Slashfilm]

Are you one of the millions and millions of people who enjoyed the charm and levity of The Avengers? Good news, then: Joss Whedon, the writer and director of the billion-dollar blockbuster, has signed on for its sequel, Marvel Studios announced Tuesday. Whedon's return was no sure thing, as Marvel has traditionally swapped out directors for the second (and third and fourth and … ) installments of its numerous recent hits. Then there was the question of whether or not Whedon, whose career has been focused on projects that belong somewhere along the opposite end of the spectrum from the third! biggest! movie! of all time!, would want to return. But it turns out both parties wanted some more of a good thing. And that means that, for at least one more go-round, The Avengers franchise is in very capable hands. Oh, but there's more!

Somehow, despite the massive worldwide success of The Avengers — it’s at $702 million right now, although that sum doesn’t take into consideration the fact that I might go see it three more times tonight — director/nerd-hero Joss Whedon remains not a jerk. How do we know? Because he posted a roundly endearing message to his longtime fans on his website (found via THR), addressed to all the diehards who elevated Buffy to "classic TV" status through their constant sponsorship, and suffered through the early cancellations of Firefly and Dollhouse, and even sat through that one episode of Glee he directed. The gist: Joss Whedon knows how weird it is that Joss Whedon has now directed an all-time box office smash, and Joss Whedon promises that all that money will not change Joss Whedon. As the man says, “If you think topping a box office record compares with someone telling you your work helped them through a rough time, you're probably new here.” And then again: “For the record, and despite my inhuman distance from the joy-joy of it: topping a box office record is super-dope. I'm an alien, not a robot.”

Fair warning: This post is about Cabin in the Woods, directed by Drew Goddard from a script by Goddard and Joss Whedon, and about the role that spoilers and spoiler avoidance may have played in its reception, so if you're still hoping to see Cabin without knowing exactly what it is you're in for, now would be a good time to click away. To give you the opportunity to do that, here is one more sentence containing no information about the content of the movie itself: Cabin in the Woods made nearly $15 million this weekend, coming in third behind The Hunger Games and The Three Stooges. The reviews were strong — 92 percent on RottenTomatoes at this writing — but audiences surveyed by CinemaScore only gave it a C.

(Okay — spoiler buffer zone ends here. Proceed accordingly.)

So the story here is that The Cabin in the Woods was shot back in 2009 but never released because its studio, MGM, went bankrupt. Now it’s coming out, via Lionsgate, in April, two years after originally planned. In the time since, its star Chris Hemsworth put on so much Thor muscle he started going numb. That means the masses who flocked to see him charmingly swing his magic hammer might not even recognize him here. But the big attraction is Cabin's serious genre credentials, in the form of co-writer/demigod Joss Whedon — who, like Hemsworth, is onto bigger things, with the Avengers movie — and co-writer/director Drew Goddard, the man behind Cloverfield.