A non-musical remake of Disney's live-action/animated film Pete's Dragon may not seem like one that would demand a ton of talent around it but that's exactly what it's got. David Lowery's film already stars Robert Redford, Bryce Dallas Howard, Wes Bentley, Oakes Fegley, and Oona Lawrence, and now you can add Dexter's Michael C. Hall. The film centers on an orphan boy who befriends a giant imaginary dragon. [Variety]
Last year Aubrey Plaza starred in the extremely raunchy comedy The To Do List, so she should be a perfect fit for a film titled Dirty Grandpa. She joins Zac Efron, Robert De Niro, and Zoey Deutch in the Dan Mazer-directed comedy about "an uptight twenty-something (Efron) who embarks on a road trip before his wedding to bond with his recently widowed grandfather (De Niro) only to find that his grandpa is a foul-mouthed lunatic on a mission to get laid during Spring Break." That sounds kind of great, actually. [Deadline]
Bruce Willis is finally bringing Elmore Leonard's book Bandits to the big screen. Years ago he had optioned the rights only to have it lapse and get picked up by Quentin Tarantino along with a bunch of other Leonardo novels. He, of course, ended up adapting Rum Punch into Jackie Brown while the other books again lapsed. Now Bandits is back in Willis' control and he's hired Mitch Glazer (Passion Play) to write the script. The dark comedy's complicated plot follows "Jack Delaney, an ex-con who is struggling to stay on the straight path as he dresses up corpses as a mortician in his brother’s funeral home. Things get much more exciting for him when he meets a gorgeous lapsed nun who is just back from Nicaragua where she took care of lepers and tried to keep the contras from hacking them up with machetes. She wants to smuggle a beautiful young Nicaraguan woman – who contracted leprosy–because the woman’s ex-lover, a Somoza-type colonel, wants to kill her for possibly infecting him. That same guy is raising millions from rich Americans to take back to the contras and the bored mortician finds his own cause, stiffing the colonel and getting away with a fortune with the help of the nun and an ex-cop." [Deadline]
