Non-news item of the day: sequel seeks to take away Hannibal Lecter’s bite.

Can there really be audience interest in the continuing cinematic saga of Hannibal Lecter? ETonline.com’s feature story “Meet Young Hannibal” includes ET is on the set! footage to accompany its profile of the young French actor Gaspard Ulliel who will be playing the titular role in Young Hannibal: Behind the Mask, due out in November.

And this couldn’t look more boring, more direct-to-video, less like a follow-up to a multiple-Oscar-winning classic. Can the people behind this really be so hard up for money to have created something that just looks so wrong?

It’s hard to pinpoint exactly what’s right about what we see here: not the “Sprockets” reject-like Ulliel; not the movie’s title, which sounds like a VH1 Cannibal Retrospective (isn’t it conceivable that a “young Hannibal” wouldn’t even be wearing his famous mask yet? So how exactly would be expect to go behind it?); and certainly not the brief soundbite from poor bewildered Anthony Hopkins, who seems more surprised than anyone that the character he made famous (sorry, Brian Cox) has been so thoroughly rogered by the sequel system.

Indeed, this might have soured us on All Things Lecter had we not also noticed this delightful tidbit in which US Treasury Secretary John Snow bears more than a passing resemblance to our friendly neighborhood census-taker-eater: