Quick Cuts

DEATH BE NOT CHEAP

For the upcoming thriller “Final Destination,” New Line had 10,000 lenticular posters made up for theaters nationwide. The posters cost $12 a pop--normal one-sheets run only $1 each--but New Line’s marketing team asserts that the film’s unique concept merited the special poster on which different images appear from different angles. The movie is about a group of teens who “cheat death” after one of them has a premonition that the plane they are about to board will blow up. But it turns out the thwarted Grim Reaper is more determined than they thought, and the question becomes: Is it possible to elude death, even temporarily? As John Donne wrote to a personified Death in Holy Sonnet No. 10: “For those whom thou thinkest thou dost overthrow, die not.” Poetry and philosophy aside, you’ll have to see the movie, which opens March 17, for the answer.

GET OUT OF JAIL

Director Frank Darabont, who made his name with jailhouse dramas “The Shawshank Redemption” and “The Green Mile,” describes his next project, “The Bijou,” as “a very pure Frank Capra-type film . . . and it’s not a prison movie.” The film is written by Michael Sloane and is set in the McCarthy blacklist era. Casting has not begun on the film that is scheduled to shoot later this year.

AMERICAN REALTOR

In an advance screening of Mike Nichols’ intergalactic farce, “What Planet Are You From?,” one of the lines that drew the heartiest laughs from the largely industry and media audience came when, after being asked what she does for a living, the character played by Annette Bening responds: “I’m a real estate agent.” The joke, of course, is that Bening memorably played a zealous Realtor in “American Beauty” and has received an Academy Award nomination for it.