Fat Suit Optional: It seems that the only actor big enough to star opposite Russell Crowe is … Russell Crowe. Sir Ridley Scott, showing his true mettle as a knight of the British Empire, has revealed he plans to have Crowe play both the Sheriff of Nottingham AND Robin Hood in Universal’s delay-ridden Nottingham. Even so, Scott believes it’s “a good old clever adjustment of characters. One becomes the other [and by simply adding a goatee, the audience will know which is the evil one].†[MTV]
Rathbone Dreads It: Twilight’s Jackson Rathbone will play a lead in Clive Barker’s Dread, the story of a tweaked-out philosophy student who sets up experiments that test how people react to their greatest fears. Rathbone’s room is expected to prominently feature “girls.†[Shock Till You Drop]
Plum Pleads Innocent: Harlan Coben (Tell No One) has set up his 2005 thriller, The Innocent, for a big-screen adaptation with Plum Pictures. Story follows a New Jersey boy who goes to prison after defending a friend in a drunken brawl, but after he gets released years later, his past keeps coming back to haunt him. The Jersey boy’s drunken brawl? Someone said he and his three friends’ singing sucked. [Variety]
De Luca a War Hero: Mark Millar’s War Heroes is officially coming to a theater near you, thanks to producer Michael De Luca (21) and Sony. The story centers on a U.S. military program that gives soldiers superpowers, the bump in enlistments that follows, and the super soldiers who chose to become super villains. With Millar’s officially becoming a one-man comics powerhouse, it’s only a matter of time until Stan Lee puts a horse’s head in his bed. [HR]
Palace Side Story: Arthur Laurents’s West Side Story revival will play at Broadway’s Palace Theater, currently home to Legally Blonde, opening March 19, 2009. Laurents promises this “radically different†version will capture the hard-hitting reality of life in a street gang that dances and sings. [Playbill]