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At first, I thought it was a joke when it was announced in January that Huffington Post columnist and producer/screenwriter Seth Grahame-Smith was going to release a book based on British author Jane Austen’s often-filmed Pride and Prejudice to be called Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. Word is that the Hollywood studios are already in a bidding war over the movie rights.

But today, it was revealed that they are too late if they want to make the first P&P parody film of the Aughts.

For as Variety reported Monday evening, it is 1970s balladeer/rock star Elton John and his production studio Rocket Pictures who will start filming on Pride and Predator later this year. This one is a take on the book where an alien spaceship drops into the middle of the action and starts murdering all of the characters, with Will Clark directing; Clark, Andrew Kemble and John Pape with screenwriter credits, and Elton John providing music for the film… oh God, is it going to be a musical, too?

Now, it has become even more ludicrous because in digging for the facts of this story, I’ve discovered that eight months prior, young adult author Michael Thomas Ford got a three-book deal with Ballantine, starting with Jane Bites Back, a novel about the author who is now a vampire dealing with a 200-year old writers’ block and frustration over the fact that people who aren’t named Jane Austen are making more money off of her work than she ever did.

If we hear next that either Grahame-Smith or Elton John has died of ex-sanguination via puncture wounds on the neck, I think we know who to blame, don’t we?

I never thought I’d actually be saying this, but for the first time in a long time, I think I want to see a Jay Roach film.

The film in question has no name yet, but according to Variety, it will be produced by Roach (the Austin Powers movies, the Meet the… movies) and written and directed by Katia Lund, she who also directed City of God.

The story will concern that of Mukhtar Mai, a Pakistani woman who had been gang-raped in revenge for her brother’s alleged act of adultery against a neighboring tribe’s female member. She appealed to a higher court, and became a leading figure for women’s rights in Pakistan.

City of God was one of the best movies starring unknowns that I’d seen in a while, and if Lund can summon 1/10th of the power that was in that movie to be in this one, it will be a force to reckon with.

After months of circling around the news, Variety reported last night that Josh Brolin has officially been cast as the star of the Warner Bros. movie Jonah Hex, based on the DC Comics character, and we’ve got a plot now, too!

Brolin’s former Confederate soldier-turned bounty hunter and gunslinger will be facing off against John Malkovich, who will play a wealthy Southern plantation owner who has it in for Hex because he blames him for getting his son killed in the War (which sounds like he’ll be playing the Quentin Turnbull character).

It’s such a simple, good Western plot that I wonder exactly how it’s going to be a “Jonah Hex” story as opposed to your average Western that has come before or a “Man with No Name” story (with whom Wikipedia says Hex shares many characteristics). I’m also curious as to whether or not Malkovich is considering this to be another “paycheck” movie.

Production is set to start in April, and the movie will be directed by Jimmy Hayward.

Related Posts: The end of Ender’s Game and Shazam!…but there’s good news too! (updated)

…and I am actually perfectly okay with that.

Other movie fans should also be happy at the news from the Hollywood Reporter wherein director Christopher Nolan gets to put the third Batman movie on hold for a while to return to his non-Caped Crusader roots with the announcement of his deal with Warner Bros. to make a movie from an original screenplay he wrote called Inception.

Even though we don’t know what what the movie’s going to be about — other than the fact that it’s supposed to be a “contemporary sci-fi actioner set within the architecture of the mind” — I’m still fired up for this because Nolan is one of those few directors who also knows words well and can make even the most stock characters into something a bit more; Michael Caine’s butlers/assistants in The Prestige and the Batman movies is an excellent example of this.

Inception is scheduled to start production this summer for a 2010 release; whether or not this will also interfere with production for Nolan’s long-awaited remake of “The Prisoner” (first talked about by Nolan in 2006) is anyone’s guess.

Q: What do you get when you put Kevin James, Chris Rock, Adam Sandler, Rob Schneider and David Spade in a comedy together?

A: I don’t know; Columbia Pictures hasn’t released the title yet.

Variety does know that Sandler’s production company Happy Madison will be producing it; that Sandler wrote the screenplay with Fred Wolf (Dickie Roberts: Former Child Star); and that the high concept is that it’s the story of five best friends from high school who reunite on a Fourth of July weekend.

But based on what we know about these guys, I think I can guess which roles they’ll be playing in the movie:

Kevin James: He excels at being the Everyman, so he will be our “lead” and the character with whom we’re supposed to identify the most.

Chris Rock: He does angry so well I can’t see him as perhaps reprising his Rufus role from Dogma.

Adam Sandler: Duh! He’ll be the slow one of the group, who perhaps gets in a few good zingers here and there.

Rob Schneider: No contest—I see Schneider as the insane goofball with a heart of gold. He’s also going to be doing the most physical comedy.

David Spade: He’ll be the other straight man, mostly because I don’t think that his style of deadpan has worked well against other more physical and less cerebral comedians since Chris Farley died. Perhaps Spade’s character and Rock’s will be a comedy team?

I guess this means I don’t need to see this movie anymore, doesn’t it?

It’s been a while since we checked in on the shenanigans betwixt the Screen Actors Guild (SAG) and the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP), so let’s recap a bit, shall we?

On January 26, the SAG National Board of Directors cleaned house, tossing out Doug Allen as national executive director and replacing him during the interim with former general counsel David White, adding the services of John T. McGuire as the chief negotiator.

This caused president Alan Rosenberg to file an injunction against the written termination of Allen’s services, but it was thrown out by two California judges — probably in a bid to prevent the new SAG leadership from meeting with and negotiating some more with the AMPTP.

But of course, this isn’t stopping those two crazy kids and their forbidden love… of failed negotiations, for today, the AMPTP and SAG released a statement saying that they’re going to be meeting after the President’s Day national holiday.

This will mark the very first time that they’ve sat down at the negotiating table since last November, and considering that the U.S. economy has completely tanked since then and not even the new president knows when it’s going to recover, this is definitely not a time for either side to start posturing.

Oh, please… can we have some resolution?

I always keep asking how it is that “bad boy” 1990s comics artist Rob Liefeld manages to get work in the comics industry even though he is one of the worst artists, and then I find quotes like this one from director Brett Ratner at Variety:

“Most of the great graphic novels are gone, and Youngblood is one of the few comicbooks left with tentpole potential,” Ratner told Daily Variety. “It was a real personal passion project for me, and a lot of people wanted (‘Youngblood’).

Yes, that’s right. India’s mega-media conglomerate Reliance Entertainment is going to be making a movie based on the 1990s Image Comics “hit” about a superhero team that is funded and overseen by the U.S. government who get more attention acting like celebrities and rock stars than for doing their jobs… much like Liefeld himself.

This is one of many deals to have come out of the Berlin Film Festival, and the beginning of the many film deals to come out of the development contracts Reliance has signed last year with such stars and their production companies as Brad Pitt, George Clooney, and Jim Carrey.

Variety says Reliance paid around $500,000 Youngblood’s rights, and that the project will be fast-tracked alongside a second project of Ratner’s, a French graphic novel called Fly Wires (to be renamed Infinity), with Sylvain White (Stomp the Yard) directing John Collee (Master and Commander) writing the script.

But it’s the first part of Ratner’s statement that really rankles. “Most of the great graphic novels are gone”? Hello, what about Sandman? Or Finder? Or Planetary? Or Transmetropolitan? Or Interman? Greg Rucka’s Whiteout is coming out in September; why not give Queen & Country a shot, too?

Hell, Neil Gaiman has said that if someone were to give director Terry Gilliam $70 million, they could make the Good Omens movie, which has far better potential for being a “tentpole” film than a Youngblood movie ever has.

Oh, India… and here I was ready to be excited about you guys entering the Hollywood game.

According to Variety, the next film to come out of the lucrative-thus-far deal between Universal Pictures and Hasbro to make movies of their properties will be a film based on the board game Candy Land.

Yes, that Candy Land.

The one that teaches counting and colors to kids, using a storyline that no one really follows or uses when playing the game and changed its rules in 2004 to be even more simpler to play.

Madagascar 2 screenwriter Etan Cohen will be tackling the script for Candy Land and the film is set to be directed by Kevin Lima (he who also directed Disney’s animated Tarzan and their semi-animated Enchanted) which was a very smart move on Universal’s part because both them seem to know what they’re doing when it comes to making kid movies that have crossover audience appeal. Huzzah to the agents who brokered that deal.

Still, I can’t help but feel as if we’re living in a certain cartoon strip’s reality…

Related Posts: Universal and Hasbro sign a six-year pact (updated)

Late last evening, Variety noted that Warner Bros. is negotiating with Martin Campbell to direct their movie about DC Comics superhero Green Lantern. If this deal does go through, I think I may be interested in the idea of a Green Lantern movie for the first time DC said they’d be doing more superhero movies.

It’s not to say that Greg Berlanti who was the previously announced director couldn’t have done a decent job but as a mostly TV man, he’d have an interesting time doing the transition to movies. But Campbell has solid screen credits and experience in directing the first installment in genre movies, having directed directed Pierce Brosnan and Daniel Craig’s first Bond films (Goldeneye and Casino Royale, respectively) as well as the first in the recent Zorro trilogy movies, The Mask of Zorro.

Still, they’re “in negotiations” and we all know how that can go.

Related Posts: Warner and DC talk about doing… something… maybe…

After a turn in The Merchant of Venice as Shylock which didn’t do so well in the box office but got decent reviews, Al Pacino is going back for more, as Variety noted yesterday.

Pacino will be starring in Michael Radford’s film adaptation of King Lear as the titular character, a role that hasn’t been filled since Laurence Olivier starred in a British TV movie version back in 1983. Barry Navidi will be producing; no other cast members have been named, but since the entire thing will be filmed in Europe this year, I do hope to be seeing a lot of Royal Shakespeare Company alumni in the cast.

On a minor interesting note, Pacino and Navidi also worked on Salomaybe? which Pacino wrote and directed about Oscar Wilde’s “Salome,” in the same style as Looking for Richard, which Pacino also directed. They’ve been working on it since 2006 and once it gets a release date, you know I’ll be zooming over to either the Angelika or the IFC Theater to check it out.

For “Avatar” fans, the good news from Variety on Sunday evening was that pop artist Jesse McCartney will no longer be playing the role of Zuko in M. Night Shyamalan’s live-adaptation of the Nickelodeon animated series (to be called The Last Airbender). When this was announced back in December, there was a huge uproar and a fan-driven campaign to let Paramount Pictures know that the series’ fanbase is upset with its casting choices.

The article quoted Shyamalan who said that McCartney had “tour dates that conflicted with a boot camp I always hold on my films, and where the actors here have to train for martial arts.”

Instead, Slumdog Millionnaire star Dev Patel will be taking over as the nominal “bad guy” of the movie from the Fire Nation, and off-Broadway star Jessica Jade Anders will be playing the role of Suki, a female warrior from the Earth Kingdom… which many fans are already interpreting as throwing the fanbase a bone and continuing to do minority actors a disservice by casting them only as villains or in bit parts.

I do have to say that my favorite part so far of this whole developing story is the part where MTV.com didn’t take down an interview with the outgoing McCartney which was originally posted just two days before Variety’s story broke, wherein he says of the objections to his being cast:

“I heard a lot about this online,” McCartney said, referring to fans’ criticism. “There’s a lot of hard-core fans out there [who] probably know more about it…. I’m still learning. This is M. Night’s vision and this is what he wants. To all the fans, I can tell you I’m putting my best foot forward.”

Schadenfreudalicious!

Related Posts: The Last Airbender gets cast of unknowns

One of the things I love about Twitter is that I can vicariously live through my favorite celebrities as they go about their day through my phone. Just this afternoon after turning phone messages back on, I was “watching” British author Neil Gaiman get locked out of his hotel room while doing press interviews, and that’s how I learned that he’d won the Newbery Award for The Graveyard Book. Bravo for him, I thought, and Twittered my (belated) congratulations.

But what I hadn’t realized until tonight is that earlier that morning while I had messages turned off, Gaiman had confirmed what he told Al Roker this morning during his “Today” show appearance about the Newbery that Neil Jordan (The Crying Game, The  Brave One) will be writing and directing the animated movie. (It’s at the 1:19 mark, if you’re interested.)

Still so very excited about this movie.

Related Posts: Neil Gaiman to produce The Graveyard Book movie

Once in limbo, the Tintin movie is definitely on track now, complete with a plotline, cast members, and a production start date. From Variety and Rope of Silicon.com, here’s what the dual press release from co-producers Paramount Pictures and Sony Pictures Entertainment revealed:

Steven Spielberg will direct the first movie, to be called The Adventures of Tintin: Secret of the Unicorn. Peter Jackson is scheduled to direct a second movie, with a third in the wings to potentially be signed later.

Tintin will be played by Jamie Bell, the British fellow who charmed audiences 8 years ago as the eponymous character of Billy Elliot and grew up enough to be in Jumper with Hayden Christensen. Playing against him as the bad guy  pirate will be Daniel Craig. Other characters will be played by Andy Serkis, Simon Pegg, Nick Frost, Gad Elmaleh, Toby Jones, and Mackenzie Crook.

Unicorn‘s screenwriters are Steven Moffat (“Doctor Who”), Edgar Wright (Shaun of the Dead) and Joe Cornish (“The Adam and Joe Show”).

Production has already gotten underway in Los Angeles, and the film is set to be released in 2011.

Related Posts: Sony and Paramount hope to resurrect Tintin

Roland Emmerich’s coming apocalyptic movie 2012 is now not coming as soon as you previously thought. Sony Pictures announced that it was moving the picture to a release date of November 13 from July 10.

But not to fret! If you still wanted to go out on the movies on the weekend after Independence Day, you could take a gander at Sacha Baron Cohen’s new film (which doesn’t really have a title yet) about his gay fashionista character Bruno which is moving to the July 10 date from May.