Category: Films

Twentieth Century Fox has purchased the film rights to environmental novel THE WORLD WITHOUT US, per THE HOLLYWOOD REPORTER. Alan Weisman's nonfiction book about what Earth would look like if humans were to suddenly disappear has been a critical and financial success.

Fox is looking to take the material, based in science, and create a fiction tale around it. The book explores, through interviews and research, how buildings and houses would disappear, how long man-made objects would last and how waste and pollutants would dissipate.

Will Arnett and Michael Shannon have joined the cast of Warner Bros. and Legendary Pictures' JONAH HEX, based on the DC Comics character, according to THE HOLLYWOOD REPORTER.

HEX will be directed by Jimmy Hayward, with production set to begin this month in Louisiana. The cast also includes Josh Brolin, John Malkovich and Megan Fox.

Arnett will play a Union soldier who enlists Hex and is then blindsided by the dirty fighting style of his enemies. Shannon will be Doc Cross Williams, an eccentric ringleader of a brutal gladiator circus.

Paramount Pictures, gearing up for the May 8 release of the STAR TREK reboot, has hired writers for a sequel, likely coming in summer 2011, according to VARIETY.

Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman, who wrote the upcoming release, will be joined by LOST co-creator Damon Lindelof. J.J. Abrams, who both directed and produced the new chapter, is set to produce the sequel with Bad Robot partner Bryan Burk, but has not yet committed to direct.

The Walt Disney Studios will debut the Disney Digital 3D versions of Disney-Pixar's animated features -- TOY STORY and TOY STORY 2 -- during a special limited engagement starting on October 2, 2009.

Dutch brand management and media company Telescreen has acquired the exclusive worldwide rights of PINKELTJE. The deal excludes the original books, as owned by copyright holder Unieboek Publishers in The Netherlands. The deal was made between Telescreen and the shareholders of the former rights holder Deja Vu BV during MIPTV in Cannes. Telescreen acquired 100 percent. of the shares.

The largest 3-D film ever released, the animated MONSTERS VS. ALIENS (Paramount/DreamWorks Animation) is a success at the box office, bringing in $59.3 million in its debut. The film grossed approximately $32.6 million on the 2,080 3-D screens (including IMAX), which represents only 28 percent of the film's runs and accounts for 56 percent of the total weekend gross.

It was the biggest weekend debut of 2009, the best opening for a 3-D film and the biggest spring opening for a non-sequel animated film.

DreamWorks Animation has hired SLUMDOG MILLIONAIRE writer Simon Beaufoy (who won the Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay for his trouble) to pen TRUCKERS, a feature in the early development stages, per THE HOLLYWOOD REPORTER.

Beaufoy had been rumored to be working on a second WOLVERINE project, but nothing has come of it yet. He is following in the animation footsteps of Michael Artndt, who won an Oscar in 2006 for LITTLE MISS SUNSHINE and headed for Pixar to work on TOY STORY 3.

Today the power of HP technology and the creative strength of DreamWorks Animation fuse to explode in 3-D action as the studio's anticipated film, MONSTERS VS. ALIENS, hits theaters worldwide.

Audiences will experience monsters that move like liquid, whose arms and mouths disappear, and whose bodies are transparent -- characters that exist in part because of the unprecedented power of HP workstations, HP ProLiant blade servers and other HP technology that enabled the increased demands of a new generation of 3-D filmmaking.

Alchemy Television Group and Spain's Drimtim Ent. will produce a four-hour miniseries about the life of Ben Hur, according to VARIETY.

ABC will air the project as a limited series, but no date has been set. Alchemy and Drimtim will also shop the project about the renegade ancient Roman hero around to other territories at next week's MIPTV.

David Wyler, son of William Wyler, the director of the 1959 version of BEN-HUR, is exec producing with Simon Vaughan at Alchemy and Roger Corbi at Drimtim.