Won’t Get Fooled Again: Will Ferrell will make his Broadway debut in a new solo show, You’re Welcome America. A Final Night With George W. Bush, directed by longtime collaborator Adam McKay (Ricky Bobby, Anchorman, and, um, a million other things?). The producing team behind August: Osage County and Speed-the-Plow will reteam for this one at the Cort Theater opening February 1. Variety worked overtime and did some sleuthing: “Plot of the show remains sketchy, but the title and timing suggest a Bush caricature.†[Variety]
Smith Joins Space Race: Kevin Smith is working on a futuristic outer-space comedy that revolves around a father-son relationship. It seems only right that the captain of the meganerd industry finally gets to make a sci-fi movie, something he’s always worked into his movies but never explored himself. However, potential investors like the brothers Weinstein should heed Smith’s warning: “The moment someone steps out of the spaceship, it’s going to cost a lot more.†Like, um, $45 million more? [HR]
O Spaceship, Where Art Thou: Warner Bros. and Brad Pitt are turning Homer’s Odyssey into an outer-space saga that focuses on a guy’s adventures as he tries to get back to Earth. WB hopes the director will be none other than George Miller, who is hilariously still attached to helm Justice League (new release date: July 4, 2018!). [Variety]
Pitt’s in the Moneyball: This Brad Pitt guy just might be going places. Columbia is hoping he’ll star in Steve Zaillian’s adaptation of Michael Lewis’s Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game. David Frankel is attached to direct to story of Billy Beane, the Oakland A’s general manager who built a baseball team on a tiny budget by using computers to analyze the draft. Take that, jocks! NERDS RULE!! [Variety]
Weir Knows the Way: Master and Commander’s Peter Weir will direct The Way Back, the true story of soldiers’ escape from a Siberian gulag in 1940. He wrote the script himself, based mostly on Slavomir Rawicz’s The Long Walk: The True Story of a Trek to Freedom, in which Rawicz recounts how his group crossed the Siberian arctic, the Gobi desert, and the Himalayas on foot. And you thought that party in Flushing was far. [Variety]