Category: Visual Effects

Angelina Jolie has been hired to star in Universal Pictures' bigscreen adaptation of the graphic novel, WANTED, reports VARIETY. James McAvoy and Morgan Freeman have already signed on and NIGHT WATCH director Timur Bekmambetov will helm.

McAvoy (LAST KING OF SCOTLAND) plays a young man who soon after learning his dad is an assassin, discovers that his father has been murdered. Jolie will take on the role of an assassin who educates the youth man in the ways of an assassin.

Michael Bay is joining his TRANSFORMER writers Alex Kurtzman and Roberto Orci on the adaptation of Whitley Strieber's forthcoming book, 2012, reports the trades. Warner Bros. is the studio behind the project and Kurtzman and Orci will also produce. In the book, a researcher travels to a parallel universe to meet his double in an effort to stop an apocalypse predicted by the ancient Mayans.

Dimension Films has announced that Alexandre Aja (THE HILLS HAVE EYES) has signed on to write and direct a new PIRANHA movie, based on the 1978 cult hit. Mark Canton (300), Marc Toberoff from IPW, Aja and Gregory Levasseur will produce. Alix Taylor, J. Todd Harris from IPW, and Chako VanLeeuwen from Chako Film will serve as exec producers.

New Line Cinema has quickly snatched up the ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK remake, which was pitched to the studio by CAA this week, reports THE HOLLWOOD REPORTER.

Neal Moritz will produce with 300 star Gerard Butler playing the lead role of Snake Plissken. Ken Nolan (BLACK HAWK DOWN) will pen the screenplay, which will add a Plissken origin story with the plot of the 1981 original, where Plissken was given the task of rescuing the president from Manhattan, which in the futuristic world of the film is turned into a prison.

Warner Bros. has hired Lionel Wigram to produce an adaptation of his own forthcoming comicbook SHERLOCK HOLMES, VARIETY reports. THE DESCENT helmer Neil Marshall will direct the film, which will be written by Michael Johnson.

The plot is being kept quiet, but it will revamp Holmes and Dr. Watson in a more darker fashion ala what BATMAN BEGINS did for that comic franchise. Wigram's version of the character plays up some of the sleuth's more adventurous qualities like his bare-knuckle boxing and swordsman skills.

Warner Bros. has paid a high-six-figure against $1 million amount for the film rights to the Newbery Award-winning novel THE GIVER, written by Lois Lowry, VARIETY reports. Red Wagon partners Douglas Wick and Lucy Fisher are producing. The repressive future set tale follows a 12-year-old boy as he is picked to bear all the feelings of his society.

Hollywood's S4 Studios has completed the on-air animated and live branding campaign for Chiller, NBC-Universal Cable Ent.'s new all-HD channel featuring 24-hour horror and thriller programming. The campaign is S4's latest major stride as it continues its emergence into a full-fledged design studio. Chiller, which launched March 1 on DirecTV, will be available as an HD simulcast channel (also with standard def), with video-on-demand and broadband-on-demand also available.

With it in U.S. theaters for less than a week, THE HOST is already being circled as a remake possibility at Universal, reports SCI FI Wire. In an interview, the original's director Bong Joon-ho stated that Universal had bought the rights to his film, which follows a dysfunctional family as they try to rescue their youngest member from the clutches of a genetically altered amphibian, which has run amok in Seoul.