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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