Scott Z. Burns penned Contagion for Steven Soderbergh as well as the upcoming zombie apocalypse thriller World War Z starring Brad Pitt and now he’s been hired to work on the sequel to Rise of the Planet of the Apes.
Rick Jaffa and Amanda Silver began working on the script and now it appears Burns has been asked in to punch up their work or do a complete page one rewrite. My assumption is he’s probably working with Jaffa and Silver’s original draft, but you never can be too sure.
The sequel will bring back director Rupert Wyatt and Andy Serkis as Caesar and is said to be “taking the story to the next level, with the apes on the path to emerge as society’s new rulers.” My hopes are high for this one. [source]
James Badge Dale is joining the cast of Iron Man 3 as another villain, this one named Savin, whom Slashfilm speculates is the comic character Eric Savin, an Army officer who was transformed into a cybernetic mercenary called Coldblood-7. Makes sense considering the film is said to center on the emergence of nanotechnology as a weapon. [source]
Scarlett Johansson was snapped on the set of Hitchcock where she plays Janet Leigh in the adaptation of Stephen Rebello’s 1998 non-fiction book “Alfred Hitchcock and the Making of Psycho tracks how Hitchcock” directed by Sacha Gervasi. I already weighed in with my thoughts on the casting (which actually have nothing to do with how much Johansson can be made up to look like Leigh), but click the source link for the full pic and see what you think. [source]
David Gordon Green is still working on his remake of Dario Argento‘s Suspiria and has just cast Orphan star Isabelle Furhman for the lead role of a young American girl who enrolls in a European school only to arrive and learn the school is a front for a coven of witches. Isabelle Huppert, Janet McTeer, Michael Nyqvist and Antje Traue have already joined the cast. [source]
Finally, a curious note was found by The Film Stage at the MPAA that lists Terrence Malick‘s new film, which has been referred to as The Burial starring Ben Affleck and Rachel McAdams, as being titled To The Wonder and rating it R for some sexuality/nudity. What’s curious about this is the film has not yet been listed on any of the MPAA’s bulletin releases and that it still is listed with “Untitled Terrence Malick Project” in parenthesis. Will this be the film’s final title? Who knows? What we do know is the following synopsis, but it’s old news but worth sharing at this point:
A philanderer (Affleck) who, feeling at loose ends, travels to Paris, where he enters a hot-and-heavy affair with a European woman (Olga Kurylenko) and ultimately marries her, partly for visa puerposes. When the relationship flounders, he rekindles a romance with a hometown girl (McAdams) with whom he’s had a long history.
The film co-stars Javier Bardem, Barry Pepper, Amanda Peet, Michael Sheen and Jessica Chastain.
