Last month, we brought you news that Robin Williams was close to signing on to reprise his role as Teddy Roosevelt in upcoming sequel Night at the Museum 3, and now another piece of casting news has been released. British thesp Dan Stevens, best known for his role as Matthew Crawley on the popular ITV/PBS soap Downton Abbey, has agreed to play Sir Lancelot, who will serve as the film's main antagonist.
NBC's police procedural/supernatural fantasy/dramatic comedy Grimm returned earlier this month, and I wasn't happy with the results. After a promising cliffhanger last year left protagonist Nick Burkhardt (David Giuntoli), a Portland detective who gains the ability to spot supernatural creatures ("Wesen") masquerading as civilians, captured by an enigmatic prince and placed in a zombified coma, the potential for Grimm to start its third season strong was sky-high. In fact, I was confident that, after two seasons of consistent mediocrity, my patience with the show would finally pay off. At last, the writers had a chance to step up and transform Grimm into truly great television.
After he delivered two raunchy misfires in a row with Your Highness and The Sitter, it's gratifying to see director David Gordon Green return to the same kind of quiet, low-key dramas that put him on the map. And with an extremely limited cast and one constant backdrop, Prince Avalanche is perhaps Green's quietest, lowest-key film yet.
Out of all the sequels to raunchy hit comedies currently in the works (22 Jump Street, Bad Teacher 2, Ted 2), one of the ones I'm most cautiously curious about is Warner Bros.' Horrible Bosses 2, which began filming in September.
Some people have all the luck. After delivering three increasingly terrific installments of the Fast & Furious franchise (in addition to Tokyo Drift), Justin Lin has signed on to direct the next entry in another box-office juggernaut: Universal's Bourne series. Lin will take over directing duties on Bourne 5 from Tony Gilroy, who helmed 2012's The Bourne Legacy to mixed reviews.
Though it's still without a title (Deep Tiki has been bandied about but never confirmed), Cameron Crowe's upcoming, Hawaii-set romantic comedy has been generating a sizeable amount of interest online, mostly thanks to its two in-demand stars, Bradley Cooper and Emma Stone (pictured above).
David Cronenberg's highly-anticipated Hollywood satire Maps to the Stars sounds a little stranger every time I hear about it. The film, which has a projected 2014 release date, aims to analyze the toxic relationship that America has with celebrity by focusing on a sinister family of Hollywood A-listers who live much more complicated and unhappy lives than initial appearances suggest.
Though the book it's based on burned up the New York Times Best Seller list when it was released back in 2009, director James Gray has been finding it surprisingly hard to get traction on a film adaptation of David Grann's The Lost City of Z. Benedict Cumberbatch signed on for the lead role of explorer Percy Fawcett earlier this fall, but little other information about the status of the project has emerged since. Today, however, Screen Daily announced that Robert Pattinson has joined the cast of the film in a major role.
To the surprise of absolutely no one, FX has picked up its hit anthology series American Horror Story for a thirteen-episode fourth season, which is expected to debut next October.
Italian filmmaker Paolo Sorrentino has secured British thesp Michael Caine to star in his next feature film, a mysterious project tentatively titled In the Future. The film will be Sorrentino's second English-language effort; his first, This Must Be the Place, premiered to mostly positive reviews when it screened in competition at Cannes back in 2011.
