Apart from totally digging my new Avatar and wanting to show it off (and see if anyone recognizes it) I have something to add:
With the phenomenal success of both H. Potter and LotR, every major studio is doing the same thing. They're all having meetings (which they have anyway, that's not new) and in those meetings, someone's saying; 'What do we have that's like that?'
So whoever's got the rights to every fantasy series ever is looking around to see how secure those rights are. Often, the less enthusiastic a company was about making the movie back when Fantasy was crap, the less likely the company is to have secure rights to an IP. Vivendi Universal, for instance, might have the rights to the Thomas Covenant books, for instance, because they were once MGM and maybe MGM had them. But maybe MGM sublicensed them to someone else or made a deal with a director and now Universal can't get the movie done without going and finding that director and God Knows Who Else.
It'll be interesting to see what projects formerly dying a slow death will suddenly get moved to the fast track and how many projects that get moved to the fast track suddenly derail because all the rights weren't in the right place.