News Shotgun 7/8
- James Spader the new CEO of Dunder Mifflin Sabre: Stealing a lot of the show during The Office’s season finale was James Spader as a creepily effective salesman who was up for the job of Dunder Mifflin manager. It was revealed this week that Spader will be a part of The Office but actually taking over the role that Kathy Bates has had as CEO of Sabre. There’s still no word about who will be the new manager.
- Uncharted gets a new director and script: With David O. Russell and his horrible sounding family drama version of the brilliant Uncharted series of games leaving the project a few weeks ago, Neil Burger, who most recently directed Limitless, has signed on to direct and also help rewrite the script. Burger also directed The Illusionist.
- Paramount creating animation studio: Paramount is probably one of the most powerful movie studios right now, with the Marvel movies, Transformers and more. Now Paramount has decided to enter the animated market by announcing they will open a CG animation studio with their first movie being released in 2014. Paramount has previously been the distribution arm for Dreamworks Animation and their contract is set to expire at the end of next year. This year actually had a possible taste of what a Paramount animation studio could have with Rango.
- Space Invaders optioned for a movie: Lorenzo Di Bonaventura, producer extraordinaire behind GI Joe, Transformers, Red and Salt, has optioned the classic arcade/Atari game Space Invaders for a movie. Space Invaders didn’t have a plot so it’s pretty much open to anything they want to do but I don’t see how this could be anything other than a generic alien invasion movie.
- Ray Stevenson cast as Firefly in GI Joe 2: More casting news from GI Joe 2: Cobra Strikes (really with that subtitle?) as former Punisher and member of the Warriors Three, Ray Stevenson has been cast as evil Cobra mercenary Firefly, a ninja and explosives expert who is frequently hired by Cobra Commander for attacks.
- Ralph Fiennes, Javier Bardem and Naomi Harris all confirmed for Bond 23: A couple months ago we heard that either Ralph Fiennes or Javier Bardem were in talks to play the villain of next year’s Bond 23 but now it’s been confirmed that both of them will be in the movie, although who they would be playing is not known. I think it would be awesome if Bardem was the main villain and Fiennes was revealed as possibly the Blofeldesque head of Quantum. Naomi Harris, probably best known as Tia Dalma from the Pirates movies, has been cast as the re imagining of classic Bond character Miss Moneypenny.
- The movie formerly known as Headshot gets additional cast, loses Tom Jane: We’ve been greatly interested in Stallone’s upcoming movie, Headshot, since it got announced months ago but there’s been some big shakeups with it in the last month or so. Firstly, it got a title change but a new title has not been announced yet and secondly, and disappointingly, Tom Jane left the project. A whole slew of casting news got released today with Sung Kang of the Fast & Furious series taking over for Jane and Christian Slater, Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje, Sarah Shahi, Jason Momoa and Holt McCallany all joining the movie.