Casting & Development | featured news

Harrison Ford isn't ready — "yet" — to talk about his reported part in Disney's planned "Star Wars" sequel, but he praises its director, J.J. Abrams. "I think he's fantastic," Ford said in a recent interview.Read more on NewsOK.com

We heard stories of actors not showing up for work before (Lindsay Lohan says hello), but rarely do we hear one about the director not showing up -- on the first day of production, no less. Well, here's one for the ages. According to Deadline, Lynne Ramsay, who directed the indie thriller We Need to Talk About Kevin, did not show up for work when the cameras were set to roll on the western Jane Got a Gun, leaving the cast and crew members high and dry. Apparently, that was her way of saying she quit.

Never one to abandon a franchise until he's slurped every molecule from its marrow, Sylvester Stallone is enthusiastically preparing for the inevitable Expendables 3 -- and because social media is the poorly spelled gift that keeps on giving when it comes to celebrity pronouncements, we have a few new tidbits about the next sequel, courtesy of Sly himself.

If there are any doubts as to whether or not Carrie Fisher will return as Leia in Star Wars: Episode VII, those can be put to rest because Fisher has confirmed her involvement.

A new Bruce Lee movie, titled Birth of the Dragon, is in the works, and this one is said be inspired by the duel between Lee and martial arts instructor Wong Jack Man in San Francisco, according to The Hollywood Reporter. According to some accounts, this fight lasted only a couple of minutes with Lee laying the smack down on Wong. Wong disputed this however.

Well, this is unexpected: Arnold Schwarzenegger's comeback tour will apparently include a detour back through the Hyborian Age. Schwarzenegger is reportedly set to star in The Legend of Conan, which screenwriter and co-producer Chris Morgan describes as "Conan's Unforgiven." (Lest you scoff at that notion, he also promises that it will be "a worthy successor to the original film.")

Who didn't see this coming after Clint Eastwood started talking to an imaginary Obama, by way of a chair, on stage at the Republican National Convention? Variety is reporting that Beyonce has “fallen out of” the somewhat highly anticipated “A Star is Born” remake which Mr. Eastwood is slated to direct. The PR line is that Bey has a lot going on and since no clear start date for filming had been set, figuring out her schedule for projects was becoming too complicated. See sentence one for the likelier explanation.

Patrick Stewart's version of the Professor X character met his maker in X-Men 3, but according to statements he made during a recent Q&A, it seems like he may be making a return to the franchise.

Well, you pretty much knew this was coming: Producer Adi Shankar has announced that the upcoming all-female Expendables project will star none other than Gina Carano. Carano, the MMA star who proved she could kick cinematic ass in Steven Soderbergh's Haywire, is Hollywood's most natural fit for the film -- something Shankar acknowledged when he said filming without her would be "like making Twix without caramel or Jamba Juice without jamba."

These things happen in Hollywood, and, this time, they happened to Tobey Maguire.
Maguire didn't jell in Ang Lee's forthcoming Life of Pi—he was "too famous" for the $100 million drama's largely unknown cast, according to the Hollywood Reporter—and the actor has been excised from the flick, replaced by Prometheus' Rafe Spall.