Casting news: Diane Kruger and January Jones have joined Liam Neeson in the cast for Spanish director Jaume-Collet Serra’s forthcoming thriller Unknown White Male.
Neeson plays the role of a man who awakens from a coma only to find that somebody has stolen his identity. A man on a mission, he sets out to get it back! Jones, who has been excellent in award-winning TV drama Mad Men, will play Neeson’s doubting wife, who may or may not be involved in the conspiracy. Kruger will play a taxi driver who becomes Neeson’s ally as he tears through the streets of Berlin, searching for answers.
This will be Serra’s third collaboration with producer Joel Silver, after House of Wax and Orphan. Expectations are somewhat tempered for this movie as House of Wax was an unbelievable piece of rubbish “starring” Paris Hilton, whose more-wooden-than-Pinocchio’s-coffin performance earned her a Razzie, while Orphan was decidedly hit-and-miss.
The movie is set to begin filming in Berlin in January and distributors Warner Bros.must be hoping that the movie follows the success of, personal fave, Taken.
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Universal Pictures is working on a movie adaptation of Dark Horse’s Fear Agent. This comicbook franchise revolves around a colourful, possibly alcoholic astronaut named Heath Huston. The Texas native works as a fear agent, the last of a dwindling breed of spacemen whose mission it is to fight threats to the planet Earth, which is partly destroyed during the course of the series.
Newsarama has interviewed Fear Agent writer Rick Remender and artist Tony Moore about the forthcoming feature film and the guys have confirmed that they “would love to see Jon Hamm don the spacesuit. After seeing ‘Mad Men,’ we’re convinced he’s our guy.”
Moore added: “In the end, it couldn’t be made too slick, you know? Abandoning the Atomic Age aesthetic would undermine a big part of what it’s about, high adventure with that sense of danger and bravery that goes with WW2 heroes and Apollo 11 astronauts. So the insides of the rocket would still have to feel like a submarine, the weapons would have to look like cool old kids’ toys, and the monsters would still have to be built like they walked off a pulp cover. Otherwise, you end up with some kinda soulless overbaked garbage like that ‘Lost in Space’ movie.”
It all sounds very cool indeed. You can read the full interview here.
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DreamWorks Pictures has hired Shutter Island writer Laeta Kalogridis to adapt Ghost in the Shell, the Japanese multimedia franchise composed of manga, animated films, anime series, video games and novels. Founder of Marvel Studios, and current head of Seaside Entertainment, Avi Arad is all set to produce the 3D live-action film.
Ghost in a Shell focuses on the activities of the fictional counter-terrorist organization Public Security Section 9 in a futuristic, cyberpunk Japan. The series has spawned three anime film adaptations and an anime TV series, with the second anime film, Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence, being released in the US by DreamWorks in 2004.
Steven Spielberg has been rumoured for the directors chair but this probably won’t happen as the 2011 potential release date clashs with his other projects, including TinTin, making it more likely that he take a producer credit.