Stallone, Jason Statham team up for Expendables
Sylvester Stallone and Jason Statham have become expendable. The pair will join Jet Li, who’s in final negotiations, as a team of mercenaries in The Expendables, an action film that Stallone wrote and will direct.
The main characters are sent to infiltrate a South American country and overthrow its ruthless dictator to liberate the population. Their team is “expendable,” hired to do jobs that no one else can or will. Principal photography will begin in February in Costa Rica and Louisiana.
The film is the first in Stallone’s two-picture deal with Nu Image/Millennium Films. The second is expected to be the next installment of his popular Rambo series. The studio’s most recent collaboration with Stallone, Rambo, grossed $155 million worldwide this year. Statham and Li previously collaborated on the martial-arts actioner War.
Jack Black giant in Fox’s Gulliver’s Travels
Jack Black will star in Fox’s re-imagining of the classic tale Gulliver’s Travels.
The film centres on free-spirited travel writer Lemuel Gulliver (Black) on assignment in Bermuda who suddenly finds himself a giant among the tiny inhabitants of the hidden island of Lilliput. Rob Letterman (Shark Tale) will direct.
Principal photography begins in March next year, but no location has yet been picked for the shoot.
Black next will be seen in the Judd Apatow-produced The Year One for Columbia in June, while Letterman directs Monsters Vs. Aliens, due in March from DreamWorks Animation.
NBC screened a Gulliver’s Travels miniseries in 1996, with Ted Danson and Mary Steenburgen heading the cast.
Bond director Mark Foster in for Die Bad
With his James Bond movie Quantum Of Solace set to blow the doors off the worldwide box-office, director Marc Forster has signed on for a new project.
The German-Swiss filmmaker, who previously shot specialised fare like Stranger Than Fiction and Finding Neverland, has been attached to Die Bad, a remake of a Korean action movie.
The original film, released in 2000, centres on a set of interlocking stories featuring a gangster and gang violence in South Korea. The Universal Pictures remake will be set in the United States.
Solace, which has already broken U.K. box-office records ahead of its November 14 bow in North America, has been acknowledged by many critics as perhaps the most action-heavy James Bond movie in the long-running franchise.
