Whiz of the Web: Tuesday Torpedoes

The shapeless dough of the internet, formed into tasty pellets and baked to perfection, just for you.

• Authorized copies of US sitcoms are becoming really popular in Russia these days - especially the Russian version of "Married... With Children." Crazy! (Via Jason and Jill)
• You can now download a free demo of Quake Wars. We just thought you should know. (Via)
• Looks like a copy of Halo 3 might have slipped out early via eBay.
• The Harry Potter films are now officially the top-grossing franchise in movie history. And considering some of the ridiculously successful franchises out there, that's pretty impressive.
• When it came out recently that Steven Lisberger, the original creator of Tron, was doing a new movie, a lot of geeks, their '80s nostalgia activated, hoped for a few moments that they were about to read about a Tron sequel in the works. Sadly, it was not so. But it is so now! The next chapter of Tron is coming, to be produced by Lisberger, written by Lost writers Eddie Kitsis and Adam Horowitz, and probably developed and directed by Joseph Kosinski, who's in final negotiations now. It's true, Tron is not really a great movie, but the kid still living inside us thinks it's awesome anyway, and we're looking forward to seeing what an updated Tron film will be like.
• In the upcoming The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor, Mario Bello says she'll be playing a kick-ass, action star version of the character Rachel Weisz played in the previous two Mummy movies. Against our better judgement, we're starting to get mildly interested in this movie...
• Curmudgeon Gamer has done a detailed analysis of PS3 backwards compatibility based on tests with his own extensive library of PS2 games. Check out the results here. (Via)
• The results of this recent study seem obvious when you first read them: video games with a Metacritic score of greater than 90% sold 531% more than the industry average. But if somebody did a similar study comparing Hollywood ticket sales to Rotten Tomatoes freshness ratings, we're betting they'd get a nearly inverse result. Are video game critics better respected by players than movie critics are by film goers?