Sources close to the actor confirm that after waiting for 20th Century Fox to set a budget and a fall start, Washington has formally withdrawn from the film and is looking at other projects to keep him busy this autumn.
Washington had planned since April to reteam with Tony Scott, this time to play a veteran engineer who jumps into a locomotive with a young conductor (”Star Trek’s” Chris Pine) to halt an unmanned runaway train filled with a toxic chemical.
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Natalie Portman has been cast as the female lead in “Thor,” Marvel Studios’ adaptation of its comic book featuring the Norse god of thunder. Kenneth Branagh is directing.
Portman will play Jane Foster, who in early comic book lore was a nurse who became Thor’s first love. The studio said the character will be updated for the feature adaptation, with Foster being a doctor-scientist type.
Chris Hemsworth is already cast as Thor. Tom Hiddleston is Loki, the god of mischief who serves as the movie’s villain.
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Jackie Chan will play the wise kung-fu master in a Hollywood-Chinese remake of the 1984 hit “The Karate Kid” that kicked off filming in the Chinese capital at the weekend, a movie company publicist said Monday.
Chan’s young disciple in “Kung Fu Kid” will be played by Jaden Smith, the son of Hollywood superstars Will Smith and Jada Pinkett Smith, China Film Group spokesman Weng Li told The Associated Press in a phone interview.
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Susan Sarandon and John Goodman are set to co-star opposite Al Pacino in “You Don’t Know Jack,” HBO Films’ biopic of Jack Kevorkian, which is being directed by Barry Levinson.
Kevorkian, known as Dr. Death, assisted in more than 130 suicides. After willingly sending a videotape of himself euthanizing a terminally ill man to “60 Minutes,” he was convicted in 1999 of second-degree murder and spent eight years in prison before getting paroled in 2007.
Loosely based on Neal Nicol and Harry Wylie’s book “Between the Dying and the Dead: Dr. Jack Kevorkian’s Life and the Battle to Legalize Euthanasia,” the HBO film follows Kevorkian’s (Pacino) rise as he builds his infamous Mercy Machine and sets out to perform assisted suicides while waging an epic legal battles defending a patient’s right to die.
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Just weeks before Paramount Pictures invades theaters with “G.I. Joe: Rise of Cobra,” the studio is teaming with Joe Roth to pick up Mattel’s “Max Steel” as another action figure it wants to play with on the bigscreen.
The toy property revolves around a 19-year-old extreme sports junkie recruited by a secret agency after an accident infects his body with nanobots, making him superhuman.
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