Mar 27, 2009 10:35 AM
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Hollywood, 12:34 AM
Wed Feb 10
55 posts in the last 24 hours
Chopping Block gets chopped, J.J. Abrams gets extended, and Ricky Gervais' next film will be unlike anything he's ever done before except for The Office.
NBC has killed the now-ironically named Chopping Block, a food competition featuring British chef Marco Pierre White after three episodes that grabbed a whopping 2% of 18-to-49-year-olds. It will be replaced by Law & Order: Department of the Health Inspector [Variety].
Paramount has extended its production deal with J.J. Abrams' production company Bad Robot through 2013. Abrams' latest film is Star Trek, due out in May; Morning Glory, a Rachel McAdams-Harrison Ford vehicle, starts production in June [Variety].
Paramount and Dreamworks' 3D cartoon Monsters vs. Aliens opens today on 7,000 screens, 2,000 of which will feature the 3D wizardry. Industry watchers are anxiously awaiting box office to see if anyone will really pay an extra $3 or $4 a ticket to be nauseated for an hour-and-a-half [Variety].
Sony has picked up Ricky Gervais' The Men at Pru, a "coming-of-age tale about a group of men working at an insurance company"—Prudential maybe?-"in the 1970s." Gervais will write, produce, and direct in collaboration with Stephen Merchant. It's unclear whether the pair will successfully be able to capture the essence of what it's like for young men to work in stultifyingly dull white-collar desk jobs [Variety].
Slumdog Millionaire screenwriter Simon Beaufoy will write Truckers, an animated feature for DreamWorks, and not Wolverine II, as the internet had hoped. No one knows what Truckers will be about, though if Beaufoy brings the Slumdog magic, we expect it will involve adorable young truckstop hookers [THR].
Bids are coming in high on Sumner Redstone's movie theater chain, which is good because he needs the money [Variety]. More than 60 actors cast in this year's pilots are foreigners. This will be on Lou Dobbs tonight [THR]. Taye Diggs will play a vampire in Dead of Night [THR].
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