Random Movie Stuff - 3/27/12

- Chloe Moretz (Kick-Ass, Hugo, Dark Shadows) has been offered the title role in MGM's remake of Carrie, based on the classic Stephen King novel about a shy girl with telekinetic powers who has the worst prom ever.  Kimberly Peirce (Boys Don't Cry) will direct.

- Chloe Moretz has also joined the cast of The Drummer, a biopic about Beach boys drummer Dennis Wilson, who died in 1983.  It stars Aaron Eckhart, Vera Farmiga and Rupert Grint (Harry Potter).

- Kenneth Branagh (Thor) will direct the next Jack Ryan movie.  The reboot would star Chris Pine, who'd star after filming on Star Trek 2 is complete.  Alec Baldwin, Harrison Ford and Ben Affleck have played Tom Clancy's Jack Ryan in movies past.

- Channing Tatum and Mila Kunis have been offered the leads in Jupiter Ascending, the next sci-fi movie from Andy & Lana Wachowski (The Matrix).

- Melissa Leo (The Fighter) has joined the cast of Oblivion, a sci-fi thriller from Joseph Kosinski (Tron Legacy).  It stars Tom Cruise, Morgan Freeman, Olga Kurylenko (Quantum of Solace) and Nikolaj Coster-Waldau (Game of Thrones).

- Greg Dean Schmitz's Upcomingmovies.com was one of my must-visit sites about 10 years ago.  Yahoo bought his site awhile back, and now he's the main news guy for RottenTomatoes.com, a site I currently can't go a week without visiting.  Here's some news tidbits from his Weekly Ketchup column, which gives his top ten movie stories of the week (be they fresh or rotten):

1.  Michael Bay's producing a new Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movie, now titled Ninja Turtles, as the plan to have them actually be aliens.
2.  Brett Ratner's name has been attached to direct Midnight Run 2, a sequel to the 1988 hit with Robert DeNiro and Charles Grodin.  DeNiro's expected to return but not Grodin.
3.  Jessica Biel will play Vera Miles in Alfred Hitchcock & the Making of Psycho, starring Anthony Hopkins (Hitchcock), Helen Mirren (his wife), James D'Arcy (Anthony Perkins), Scarlett Johansson (Janet Leigh) and Michael Stuhlbarg (agent Lew Wasserman).
4.  Ron Howard's production company Imagine Entertainment is developing another big-screen treatment of George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four.