Movie Production Update: February 20, 2009

Once again I bring you the best round-up of all the movie updates announced in this past week’s trade reports. Some I reported on throughout the week others I held until now. Either way here is the lot.

Check out the full list and links are available if the film is in the database already, and remember you can keep up with all new films added and updated on the site right here 24/7.

Title: Untitled Crowley Project

Studio: CBS Films

Director: Tom Vaughan (What Happens in Vegas)

Screenwriter: Robert Nelson Jacobs

Cast: Harrison Ford, Brendan Fraser, Keri Russell

Storyline: Russell plays Aileen Crowley, a wife and mother who relentlessly builds a normal, loving home life for her children while her husband, John Crowley (Fraser), and an unconventional scientist (Ford) race against time to build a company that could rescue them. The film is inspired by a true story.

Title: Wedlocked

Studio: Not Available

Director: Rob Hedden (The Condemned)

Screenwriter: Rob Hedden

Cast: Katharine McPhee, Dave Annable

Storyline: Annable will play a pet photographer who gets mixed up with a mobster and his daughter, who is angling for American citizenship. Things go terribly awry on their forced honeymoon.

Title: The Chameleon

Studio: Not Available

Director: Jean Paul Salome

Screenwriter: Jean Paul Salome, Natalie Carter

Cast: Marc-Andre Grondin, Ellen Barkin, Famke Janssen

Storyline: Revolves around the reunion of a young man (Grondin) and his family after being positively identified in an unsolved missing-persons case. The reunion turns bittersweet when suspicions arise about whether he really is their son. Barkin will play the mom, and Janssen is an FBI agent. Nick Stahl and Emilie de Ravin also star. The project was inspired by a real person profiled in an August article in the New Yorker titled “The Chameleon: The Many Lives of Frederic Bourdin.” Bourdin assumed at least 39 identities, three of them missing teens.

Title: The Associate

Studio: Paramount Pictures

Director: Not Available

Screenwriter: William Monahan (The Departed)

Cast: Shia LaBeouf

Storyline: Adaptation of John Grisham’s bestselling legal thriller in which LaBeouf will play a Yale Law School student with a sordid secret that leaves him vulnerable to blackmail. He’s manipulated into taking a job at a law firm and working on a multibillion-dollar lawsuit.

Title: Who Is Doris Payne

Studio: Not Available

Director: Not Available

Screenwriter: Eunetta Boone

Cast: Halle Berry

Storyline: A fact-based film about an international jewel thief whose career spanned five decades.

Title: Back to Africa

Studio: Warner Bros.

Director: Not Available

Screenwriter: Not Available

Cast: Martin Lawrence

Storyline: The comedy centers on a working-class man from Queens who discovers he is heir to the throne of an African country and travels there to claim his birthright.

Title: Nerverackers

Studio: Dimension Films

Director: Robert Rodriguez

Screenwriter: Robert Rodriguez

Cast: Not Available

Storyline: Set in 2085, the story centers on a character named Joe Tezca who is part of an elite unit dispatched to quell a crime wave in a theoretically perfect future society.

Title: Life of Pi

Studio: Fox 2000

Director: Ang Lee (Brokeback Mountain)

Screenwriter: Not Available

Cast: Not Available

Storyline: Adaptation of Yann Martel’s coming-of-age survival tale revolving around a youth who is the lone survivor of a sunken freighter and winds up sharing a lifeboat with a hyena, an injured zebra, an orangutan and a hungry Bengal tiger.

Title: Traded

Studio: Paramount Pictures

Director: Not Available

Screenwriter: David Stem, David Weiss

Cast: Ashton Kutcher

Storyline: Centers on a superstar NFL quarterback and a 12-year-old middle school geek who magically trade bodies, then quickly learn valuable lessons about humility and courage.

Title: School for Scumbags

Studio: Not Available

Director: Not Available

Screenwriter: Aaron Rapke, Stewart Kaye

Cast: Not Available

Storyline: Adaptation of Danny King’s novel centering on a teen who, after being expelled from a long list of schools, lands at a campus for “misdirected” teens where the teachers are actually professional thieves who teach them to execute the heist of the century.

Title: How Do You Know? (Working Title)

Studio: Columbia Pictures

Director: James L. Brooks (Spanglish)

Screenwriter: James L. Brooks

Cast: Owen Wilson, Paul Rudd, Reese Witherspoon

Storyline: Involves a love triangle. Rudd would play a white-collar executive vying for Witherspoon’s affections, while Wilson would portray a professional baseball pitcher who is also a love interest.

Title: The Book of Eli

Studio: Warner Bros.

Director: Albert Hughes, Allen Hughes

Screenwriter: Gary Whitta

Cast: Denzel Washington, Mila Kunis, Gary Oldman, Ray Stevenson, Jennifer Beals, Michael Gambon, Evan Jones

Storyline: Centers on a lone hero named Eli (Washington) who must fight his way across the wasteland of a near-future America to protect a sacred book that might hold the key to saving the future of humanity.

Title: Untitled Robert Capa Project

Studio: Not Available

Director: Paul McGuigan (Push)

Screenwriter: Not Available

Cast: Not Available

Storyline: Centers on famed Hungarian photojournalist Robert Capa who was born Andre Friedmann in early-20th century Budapest. Capa memorialized many conflicts, including the Spanish Civil War and World War II. The colorful journalist also helped found Magnum Photos and traveled in glamorous circles that included a friendship with John Steinbeck and an affair with Ingrid Bergman.

Title: Frozen

Studio: Not Available

Director: Adam Green

Screenwriter: Adam Green

Cast: Kevin Zegers

Storyline: Zegers plays a snowboarder who gets stranded on a chairlift halfway up a New England mountain along with his best friend (Shawn Ashmore) and his girlfriend (Emma Bell) as the slopes close for the weekend. The college students must fight the icy elements and a hungry pack of wolves to survive.

Title: The Blindside

Studio: Warner Bros.

Director: John Lee Hancock (My Dog Skip)

Screenwriter: John Lee Hancock

Cast: Sandra Bullock

Storyline: Story follows Michael Oher, projected to be one of the first players selected in this year’s NFL draft. He was homeless as a teen and was taken in by a well-to-do family. Bullock will portray the matriarch of the conservative suburban household Oher joins.

Title: Five Killers

Studio: Lionsgate

Director: Robert Luketic (21)

Screenwriter: Not Available

Cast: Katherine Heigl, Ashton Kutcher

Storyline: Story kicks off when a woman meets the man of her dreams while on vacation. Married bliss is turned upside down when they discover that their neighbors may be assassins hired to kill them.

Title: Billionaire’s Vinegar

Studio: Columbia Pictures

Director: David Koepp

Screenwriter: David Koepp, John Kamps

Cast: Not Available

Storyline: Loosely based on the Benjamin Wallace book, “The Billionaire’s Vinegar: The Mystery of the World’s Most Expensive Bottle of Wine,” about a scandal that erupted when an auctioned cache of wine purported to have been culled from the stocks of Thomas Jefferson were deemed fakes by some.

Title: Article II

Studio: Columbia Pictures

Director: David Koepp

Screenwriter: David Koepp

Cast: Not Available

Storyline: Adaptation of the Charles McCarry novel “Shelley’s Heart” which will be turned into a political drama. The story will follow two friends who become bitter rivals for the presidential election, which is won by computer fraud.

Title: Salt

Studio: Columbia Pictures

Director: Phillip Noyce (Catch a Fire)

Screenwriter: Kurt Wimmer, Brian Helgeland

Cast: Angelina Jolie, Liev Screiber, Chiwetel Ejiofor

Storyline: Story centers on Evelyn Salt, a CIA officer who is fingered as a Russian sleeper spy. She eludes capture by superiors who are convinced she is out to assassinate the president. While trying to reunite with her family, she struggles to prove someone else is the traitor. Schreiber will play Salt’s boss and friend on the Russian desk at the CIA.

Title: The Losers

Studio: Warner Bros.

Director: Sylvain White (Stomp the Yard)

Screenwriter: James Vanderbilt

Cast: Jeffrey Dean Morgan

Storyline: Adaptation of the DC-Vertigo comicbook about a band of black ops commandos who are set up to be killed by their own government. They barely survive and set out to get even.

Title: Little Fockers

Studio: Universal Pictures

Director: Not Available

Screenwriter: John Hamburg, Larry Stuckey

Cast: Ben Stiller, Robert De Niro, Owen Wilson

Storyline: Third installment in the Universal Focker family comedy franchise which stars Stiller as a liberal, do-no-right husband and De Niro as his conservative, unforgiving father-in-law. Little Fockers is expected to revolve around the children of Stiller and Teri Polo, who plays his wife.

Thanks to Variety and The Hollywood Reporter for contributing to this report.

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