• As we stated below, the Lee casting is NOT yet official for Fletch (Though it seems to be everyone’s choice, including director Kev’s, so that’s the talk) and Affleck is included in the VA5 cast list, of course — It’s just tough when you hear items second or third hand, that’s all:

• As with most of Kevin’s public appearances, we learned a few things about his and some of the others’ upcoming plans. (See below for the big casting news). See below for some of the other stuff we thought you might be interested in. Also, we’ve included some pics submitted by our loyal NA scoopers who were lucky enough to snap some shots of/with Kevin and the gang. Click the thumbnails for larger versions. Here’s the tidbits:

• Kevin said he was going to do a Daredevil Hardcover self contained story.
• Jay told a story about how he was close to doing another film but the money had to back off because he was a Mexican mob guy and someone took someone hostage so he had to go back to Mexico to pay the ransom. Whoa.
• Also Jay just finished filming a movie called Pot Luck with High Times but doesn’t know when it’s gonna come out.

Feel free to use the TalkBacks area to discuss your experiences at Wizard World in Chicago!

• Hey folks, we’re back after taking the weekend off. Sorry that the news on the site (reports from the con, mainly) is a bit late. Traditionally, big news happens during the regular work week, this was just a rare case where Kevin was at a weekend event and dropped some bigger scoops. Unfortunately, in the summer months, there are times where one of us or both of us have plans and can’t pool our resources together to get an update online as timely as we’d like. Hopefully you can understand the occasional delays, we really do put a lot of time into the site and do our best to get you the news before anyone else. On those times where things are a day or so late, we hope you can understand that we’ve each got a lot of commitments outside of the website, and that there’s time where other stuff just has to come first.

That being said, let’s see what we’ve got here. Kevin’s big con revelation was the first CONFIRMED castings for View Askew 5. Given his cryptic list of initials posted a couple months back, most of you won’t be surprised, but it’s nice to see some actual names (and big ones at that) attached to the film. He also hinted at a possible casting for Fletch Won that we’d talked about since the flick was first announced. Read on for that big news now, we’ll be back with some pics and stories from the con, NewsBites, a new poll topic, and more later on today. See ya then.

• As usual, Kevin and company wowed the crowd with a 2 hour Q&A session at the Chicago Wizard World convention on Saturday. Most folks who attended the convention and checked in with us said it was by far the highlight of the weekend. We’ll have some individual reports a bit later, but for now, here’s the BIG news, some confirmed castings for “View Askew 5”, spoken by Kevin to the crowd:

In addition to correcting that Matty error (folks misheard Kev as saying “Ivy” for some reason), we can only assume Affleck WILL be back, since Kevin does promise that the open-end from Chasing Amy between Holden & Alyssa will be solved (though we’re not sure we WANT to know what happens) as well as unanswered questions from the other 3 films. And so, as all of us fanboys and fangirls dreamed, it does look like this will be a sequel of sorts to ALL the films rolled into one.

Production on the still untitled “View Askew 5” project is scheduled to begin this fall, in October or November, with a planned release of Summer 2001. Those of you checking your calendars would be astute to notice that filming may actually run at the same time that Vulgarthon 2000 is happening. Pretty damn cool, huh?

• Kevin seemed to reveal (or at least mumble in passing) at the con that Jason Lee indeed IS Fletch in his upcoming “Fletch Won” film. This is fantastic news, and something we’d hoped and predicted since day one. Lee makes the perfect Fletch, and provides an absolutely perfect transition for Kevin away from the Askewniverse and into a new direction of films. Anyone who wasn’t first excited at the thought of Kev doing a Fletch flick should think twice now. We’ll have more on this exciting development as they get closer to pre-production, of course.

Lee himself stopped by the View Askew WWWBoard early this morning to check in, so you may be able to catch him there sometime this week if you’ve got some questions. You can also see his Almost Famous trailer in theaters, and some clips from the film (featuring Lee) on VH-1’s “Behind The Music: Peter Frampton”.

Again, keep in mind that the Lee casting is only rumor at this point, if it were finalized, Variety’d surely have reported something by now. But it seems like a really good bet. Anything else would be a letdown!