The Battle for Reese: Paul Rudd and Owen Wilson are in talks to play Reese Witherspoon’s love interests in James L. Brooks’s tentatively titled How Do You Know? Details are scarce outside of it being your basic love-triangle setup, with Rudd playing a white-collar executive and Wilson a professional baseball pitcher. Fingers crossed this one turns out better than Spanglish. [Variety]
Freaky Ashton: Ashton Kutcher is set to star in Paramount’s Traded, about an NFL quarterback who switches bodies with a geeky 12-year-old. When questioned about his motivation for taking on the body-swap genre, Kutcher mostly expressed shock and bewilderment at the fact that he somehow hadn’t already done so. [Variety]
Ang’s on a Boat: Ang Lee is the latest director attached to the adaptation of Life of Pi, Yann Martel’s wildly successful 2001 novel. Dean Georgaris, M. Night Shyamalan, and Jean-Pierre Jeunet have all been linked to the project, but with Lee will come a brand-new script from an as-yet-unnamed writer. The book is about a young shipwreck survivor on a lifeboat with a hyena, a zebra, an orangutan, and a tiger; for more details, consult the members of your mother’s book club. [Variety]
Will It Rain Donuts in 2085?: Robert Rodriguez will write and direct sci-fi thriller Nerverackers for Dimension, to be released on April 10, 2010; set in 2085, the movie focuses on one Joe Tezca, a member of a police unit fighting a crime wave in a supposedly perfect society. Dimension was initially hesitant to schedule the release so specifically at this early stage of production, but ultimately decided to just make it their beeswax to put it out by then. [Variety]
Coming Back to America: Martin Lawrence will produce and potentially star in Back to America; based on an original concept from Lawrence, the film is about a working-class Queens man who finds out he is the heir to the throne of an African country and travels to said African country to claim his title. Since the movie appears to be stealing half the concept of Coming to America, the law of diminishing returns indicates it will be one-sixteenth as funny. [Variety]
The Not-Quite Dream Team: In a move many (okay, so far only us) are calling “the reverse supergroup,†a crew of odds, ends, and low-key front men — Smashing Pumpkins’ James Iha, Cheap Trick drummer Bun E. Carlos, Taylor “The Dude From Hanson†Hanson, and Fountains of Wayne’s Adam Schlesinger — have formed the band Tinted Windows. They’ve already recorded their debut album, which will be out this spring, and will play their first big show next month at South by Southwest. Surely this has already pissed off Billy Corgan somehow. [Billboard]