Film News: Pirates 4 Director Ahoy, Twilight Controversy, Theron & Worthington Are Tourists

- Disney is in talks with director Rob Marshall (Chicago, Memoirs of a Geisha) for the fourth Pirates of the Caribbean film. While producer Jerry Bruckheimer and Johnny Depp will return to the franchise, previous director Gore Verbinski has chosen to move on to new projects.  If a director is confirmed soon, the new film would begin shooting in 2010. [Variety]

- Rachelle Lefevre is out as Victoria in the third Twilight film, Eclipse, and will be replaced by Bryce Dallas Howard.  Evidently Rachelle and her castmates aren't happy about her dismissal, and Summit Entertainment isn't happy that people know Rachelle isn't happy . . . [E! Online]

- The projects keep rolling in for Hugh Jackman. The Wolverine actor has signed on to portray P.T. Barnum in The Greatest Showman on Earth, an original big screen musical. Jackman "will play the showman with a penchant for hoaxing a gullible public as he creates the three-ring circus that made him famous." Singer/songwriter Mika of "Grace Kelly" fame is in talks to write the music an lyrics. Anne Hathaway is being eyed for the female lead. [Variety]

- Charlize Theron and up-and-coming leading man Sam Worthington(Terminator Salvation, Avatar) will star in The Tourist, a remake of a 2005 French thriller. Theron will play a spy who chooses an "everyman" tourist and uses him as bait to lure a wanted criminal, who also happens to be her ex-lover. Worthington replaces Tom Cruise, who was strongly considering the project but eventually passed. [Hollywood Reporter]

- Steven Spielberg's next project will be . . . a remake?  Spielberg has chosen to tackle a remake of the 1950 film Harvey, in which Jimmy Stewart memorably played a man whose best friend is a 6 1/2-foot-tall invisible rabbit. [Variety]

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First Glimpse Down the Rabbit Hole into Burton's Wonderland

As slew of first-look images from Tim Burton's fantastical version of Alice in Wonderland have hit the web today . . . and wow! Take a look:



Johnny Depp once again teams up with Burton and Helena Bonham Carter, this time playing the Mad Hatter. Film producer Richard Zanuck says that Depp adopted an accent for the character that is "indescribable," summing it up by saying "This character is off his rocker."

Helena Bonham Carter (below) plays the tyrannical Red Queen, complete with her well-remembered phrase "Off with their heads!" and "a moat filled with bobbing noggins."

[bxA]Anne Hathaway (below) plays the deposed, good White Queen, who, according to Zanuck, "doesn't walk. She floats. She's very eccentric."

In Burton's film, Alice will be played by 19-year-old Australian actress Mia Wasikowska. Screenwriter Linda Woolverton (Beauty and the Beast) has tweaked Lewis Carroll's original story by aging up his leading lady. In the movie, a 17-year-old Alice "attends a party at a Victorian estate only to find she is about to be proposed to in front of hundreds of snooty society types." Alice flees the crowd and follows a white rabbit (Michael Sheen) down a hole and back into Wonderland, which Alice had visited as a 7-year-old girl but doesn't remember. The residents of Wonderland however, do remember her.

In additon to the Mad Hatter and the Red and White Queens, Alice will encounter the Caterpillar (Alan Rickman), the Jabberwock (the newly knighted Christopher Lee), the Cheshire Cat (Stephen Fry), the Knave of Hearts (Crispin Glover), the Bloodhound (Timothy Spall), the March Hare (Noah Taylor) and Tweedledee and Tweedledum (Matt Lucas), among others.

Filming on the project is complete and post-work is in process since the film will combine live-action, CGI animation and motion-capture creatures that will be transferred into 3D. Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland has a US release date of March 5, 2010. [USA Today][Tim Burton Collective News]

Images courtesy of Disney Enterprises

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Film News: Pixar Expands, Lots of X-Men, Weisz Becomes a Whistleblower and "Whoa"

- Disney/Pixar is launching an animation studio located in Vancouver. The Canadian studio is expected to open this fall and will focus in Pixar's "evergreen" characters such as Buzz and Woody from Toy Story and Lightning McQueen and Mater from Cars. Disney/Pixar's newest full-length animated film, Up, bows on May 29. [Hollywood Reporter]

- A Deadpool X-Men spin-off movie is in development. Ryan Reynolds will reprise his role as Wade Wilson aka Deadpool, a character first introduced into the film franchise in the recently released X-Men Origins: Wolverine but a long-time favorite of fans of the X-Men comic book series. Twentieth Century Fox is also continuing the X-Men franchise by readying Magneto and X-Men: First Class. [Variety]

- Twentieth Century Fox is also prepping a Wolverine sequel focused on a samurai storyline set (not surprisingly) in Japan. The story was hinted at in one of the "Easter egg" end credit scenes that showed Hugh Jackman's character sitting in a bar in Japan after the events at the end of the first Wolverine movie. Read Pop Wenches' review of Wolverine here. [Variety]
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- It seems that Hugh Jackman will have no shortage of projects in the near future. He is set to star in Personal Security as "a tough Gotham police detective forced into bodyguard duty for a spoiled teen heiress who is receiving kidnapping threats." The film is a newly acquired spec script penned by Matt Lieberman. Jackman will also topline the big screen version of the James Sallis novel Drive. Jackman "will play a solitary man who drives race cars by day and getaway cars by night in Los Angeles." An updated version of the Rogers & Hammerstein classic Carousel has also gotten new life thanks to a new script by David Magee. Jackman would play Billy Bigelow and has named Anne Hathaway as a favorite choice for the role of Julie Jordan, although talks with Hathaway's representatives have not yet begun. The busy Wolverine star is also slated to head back to Broadway in 2010 in the lead role in Houdini. Danny Elfman is writing the music with David Yazbek writing the lyrics. [Variety]

- Rachel Weisz will star in The Whistleblower, an indie drama based on the true story of "a female cop from Nebraska who serves as a peacekeeper in post-war Bosnia and exposes a United Nations cover-up of a sex trafficking scandal." The role is described as similar to Weisz' Oscar-winning role as a political crusader in The Constant Gardener. [Variety]

- In truly frightening news, Keanu Reeves will topline a modern retelling of The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde for Universal. Insert your own "whoa" comment here. [Hollywood Reporter]

- Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson is close to signing a deal with CBS Films to star in the action drama Faster. A change from Johnson's recent family friendly movies, Faster would see him playing "an ex-con bent on avenging the death of his brother, murdered 10 years earlier when the two were double-crossed during a heist." [Entertainment Weekly]

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