Colin, Ed Find Way Back: Colin Farrell and Ed Harris are in final negotiations to star in director Peter Weir’s The Way Back. The story is based on the memoir of Slavomir Rawicz, one of a group of soldiers who pulled off a grueling escape from a Serbian Siberian gulag in 1942. Tattooed bad boy Farrell will play a tattooed Russian bad boy, and Harris, an American, will play an American. [Variety]
Atom’s Bomb: Director Atom Egoyan has lined up Julianne Moore, Liam Neeson, and Amanda Seyfried to star in his upcoming thriller Chloe. Moore will play a doctor who tests her husband’s (Neeson) fidelity by hiring an escort (Seyfried) to seduce him. The remake of Gerard Depardieu’s Nathalie has been in the works for four years (i.e., just long enough for everyone to stop caring). [Variety]
How They Met More Money: The cast of CBS’ How I Met Your Mother just got a late Chrismukkah present: a raise. Josh Radnor, Jason Segel, Cobie Smulders Neil Patrick Harris, and Alyson Hannigan will now receive salaries between $90,000 and $120,000 per episode, between two and three times what they made before. Unfortunately, the raise is still less than some expected and leaves the salaries below what ensembles of other comedies like The Office are making. It’s really a tragic story. After all, how are you supposed to eat on a salary of $100,000 a week? [HR]
E!’s Sweet Tooth: Looks like E! has finally found a show vapid enough to pair with Keeping Up With the Kardashians. Candy Girls, a half-hour, eight-episode series which will debut alongside the third season of Kardashians in March, is a reality show following music-video background dancers as the talent agency they work for sends them to “fulfill the needs†of rappers like Kanye and Jay-Z. We didn’t think you could show that kind of thing on TV. [HR]
Zahn Investigates (Paula Not Steve): Cable network Investigation Discovery has brought Paula Zahn onboard in an exclusive deal to develop an investigative news magazine. If given the green light, the project will debut this year and mark Zahn’s return to full-time on-air news. “The process of uncovering the truth is something I have always been passionate about,†Zahn said. Keep your pants zipped. [HR]
Pay Cut: Director Mark Waters is in negotiations to direct Participant Media’s comedy Minimum Wage. Written by Tegan West and Scott Atkinson, the story revolves around a corrupt corporate executive who is sentenced to live on minimum wage after a fraud conviction. Over the course of the film, he finds out that the struggling working class are real people too and that greed is, get this, bad. How heartwarming. [HR]