LOS ANGELES (Hollywood Reporter) - Universal Pictures has scooped up domestic distribution rights to "Larry Crowne," a comedy that reteams Tom Hanks and Julia Roberts, who shared the screen in 2007's "Charlie Wilson's War."
Hanks also is directing the tale of a man reinventing his life. He wrote the screenplay with Nia Vardalos; their working relationship dates to her 2002 smash "My Big Fat Greek Wedding," which Hanks and Gary Goetzman's company, Playtone, produced.
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LOS ANGELES (Hollywood Reporter) - Betting that laughs can be found in a cancer diagnosis, Summit Entertainment has acquired North American rights to Mandate Pictures' untitled Seth Rogen/James McAvoy project.
Formerly titled "I'm With Cancer," the project began with an autobiographical script by Will Reiser, who successfully beat the disease.
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LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - Paramount Pictures on Tuesday said Tom Cruise will star in a new "Mission: Impossible" movie set for release in 2011 and produced by Cruise and J.J. Abrams.
Cruise and Abrams last teamed up in 2006 for "Mission: Impossible III," with Cruise in the role of super agent Ethan Hunt who battles bad guys and saves the world from evil.
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BERLIN (Reuters) - Roman Polanski may be under house arrest in a Swiss chalet, but the Polish-French director is set to dominate this year's Berlin film festival where his latest movie "The Ghost Writer" will be unveiled.
Interest in the 76-year-old's film, one of 20 competition entries vying for awards at the February 11-21 event, has inevitably soared since his sensational arrest in Switzerland in September.
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LOS ANGELES (Hollywood Reporter) - Tim Robbins is joining the cast of "Green Lantern," the superhero movie based on the DC Comics character.
Robbins will play Senator Hammond, the disapproving father of the movie's villain, Dr. Hector Hammond (Peter Sarsgaard), who becomes infused with psychic powers.
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LOS ANGELES (Hollywood Reporter) - Tyler Perry has found himself in a bit of copyright trouble lately for allegedly incorporating portions of copyrighted gospel music in his many successful shows.
In the latest case, North Carolina songwriter Johnny Tyrone Stringfield filed a $100,000 lawsuit last week in California District Court accusing Perry, cable channel TBS, and its Time Warner parent of incorporating an entire verse of lyrics from his song "I Got Away" in Perry's hit TV show "Meet the Browns."
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LOS ANGELES (Hollywood Reporter) - "Avatar" might have tied "The Hurt Locker" for most Oscar nominations last week (with nine apiece), but the sci-fi epic is winning in at least one category: The film once again was the most-pirated movie on the Internet last week, thanks to a DVD screener that leaked onto file-sharing networks.
Oscar buzz also seems to have compelled pirates to check out "Locker," which jumped to the fourth most-pirated film last week. Here's the entire Top 10 list of most-pirated movies on BitTorrent, according to TorrentFreak:
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PARK CITY, Utah (Hollywood Reporter) - Practically nothing is off-limits for stand-up comic Louis C.K., from toilet training his kids to Hitler and the Holocaust.
The material in this roadshow documentary is too raunchy for broadcast outlets, with pay cable a more suitable release platform, while a wider audience awaits on DVD.
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PARK CITY, Utah (Hollywood Reporter) - When it came to peddling political access for exorbitant fees, Jack Abramoff was the probably the most powerful lobbyist in Washington over a decade beginning in the mid-90s. Or the most ostentatiously reckless, considering that he's currently serving out a five-year sentence after pleading guilty in 2006 to fraud and conspiracy to bribe government officials.
Oscar-winning writer-director ("Taxi to the Dark Side") Alex Gibney's inclination to follow multiple threads of the sordid Abramoff saga in-depth is the eventual undoing of "Casino Jack and the United States of Money."
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LOS ANGELES (Hollywood Reporter) - Peter Bogdanovich will direct and co-write and direct an adaptation of Kurt Andersen's 1999 novel "Turn of the Century."
The story follows a Manhattan power couple with three kids who are managing their troubled marriage in a world where BarbieWorld has opened in Vegas and Charles Manson's parole hearing is live on TV.
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Universal Pictures has scooped up domestic distribution rights to the comedy "Larry Crowne," which will see Tom Hanks reteaming with Julia Roberts, with whom he shared the screen in 2007's "Charlie Wilson's War.".. More »
Betting that laughs can be found in a cancer diagnosis, Summit Entertainment has acquired North American rights to Mandate Pictures' untitled Seth Rogen/James McAvoy project... More »
Apparently, nothing's impossible... More »
