The last time we spoke of your mother’s favorite filmmaker, Nancy Meyers, she had lined up two new projects (The Intern and The Chelsea) that both sounded a bit out of the box for the director, but now it looks as if the Something’s Gotta Give and The Holiday creator will return to her more traditional, Pottery Barn-infused roots.

According to Deadline Hollywood, Disney is attempting to double-down on its classics. The studio is looking to create a new version of Beauty and the Beast with writer Joe Ahearne (Trance, director of several Doctor Who episodes). The goal is to make it live-action and in 3D ala Alice in Wonderland and Oz the Great and Powerful. Those names are notable not just because they represent the model for what Disney is doing here, but also because Disney is maybe the only studio who has figured out how to make fairy tales work on such a massive scale. Still, the question remains as to whether The Beast is a good idea because it steps on its own toes. Of course, maybe their re-release of the animated version was just a litmus test for going forward with this project, but while Disney’s previous successes told new stories in familiar universes, it’s unclear whether or how they’ll set something in the talking teapot-filled world while delivering a different tale (regardless as to whether it’s old as time).

Seeing as Irvine Welsh, the author of the “Trainspotting” novel, wrote a sequel to his well-regarded story about Scottish heroin addicts called “Porno” back in 2002, it’s always seemed like something of a possibility that Danny Boyle, the guy who directed the Trainspotting film, could get his crew of actors back together and shoot it as a sequel. There have always been concerns that have kept that from happening though; namely the fact that Boyle had a pretty public falling out with his Trainspotting star, Ewan McGregor, and the worry that “Porno” the novel isn’t really as good as “Trainspotting,” (so it might not be worth making into a movie). While talking to The Playlist, Boyle has revealed that he’s always wanted to make a Trainspotting sequel anyway, so he’s going to try to shoot for getting one into theaters in 2016, which would make it in time to celebrate the 20 year anniversary of the first film’s 1996 release. But what about all of those pesky concerns about “Porno” not really having what it takes to make for a good movie, and McGregor not really being so fond of Boyle anymore? Don’t worry, the director has them addressed.

Given all of the horror remakes and all of the generic haunted house movies that come out every year, it gets to be something of a chore keeping up with which films from the past have already been remade and which haven’t. Well, it turns out Tobe Hooper’s 1982 ghost story Poltergeist was on the list of movies that have yet to be remade, because Deadline Hollywood is reporting that MGM now has plans to remake it. In order to do so they’ve brought on board director Gil Kenan, who’s probably best known for helming the 2006 animated film, Monster House. Given that Monster House was also a movie about a spooky house, the theory they’re working under must be that Kenan will have the experience necessary to beat out all the other upcoming movies about spooky houses by making an even better movie about a spooky house. Plus, Poltergeist has another advantage in that it’s being called the same thing as another movie about a spooky house that people have already liked. It’s important to always stay one step ahead of the competition in the spooky house arms race. This news, of course, raises the same questions that every new remake of a classic from the past raises. Is there any reason at all to remake Poltergeist? Is there anything about the original that will benefit from a more modern take on the source material? Or is this just the latest depressing bit of evidence that the film industry has completely

Briefly: Despite reportedly being in talks with Sony to helm their long-gestating The Equalizer feature, director Rupert Wyatt will not take on the project, which still has Denzel Washington set to star. Deadline Hollywood reports that scheduling conflicts have kept Wyatt from the project, though the outlet also vows that the studio “will lock in a helmer shortly.” Stay tuned.

The New York Times reports what, in the grand scheme of thing, was probably inevitable – that Daily Show host Jon Stewart will be taking some time to write and direct his very first film, titled Rosewater. Unfortunately, Stewart’s new, quite serious undertaking will also mean that he has to actually take time off from his hosting duties. The comedian is expected to be away from his Comedy Central flagship for twelve weeks in order to film the feature, which he has already adapted from Maziar Bahari and Aimee Molloy‘s 2011 book “Then They Came for Me: A Family’s Story of Love, Captivity and Survival.” That sounds pretty serious, right? Stewart’s show actually had something to do with the true life tale at the heart of Rosewater - as the Times tells it: the “Canadian-Iranian journalist and documentarian…was jailed in Tehran in 2009 for four months, accused of plotting to stage a revolution against the government. Shortly before his arrest, Mr. Bahari had participated in a Daily Show sketch, conducted by one of the show’s correspondents, Jason Jones, who was pretending to be a spy. Mr. Bahari’s captors used the footage against him.” Of course, Stewart and company took the news quite hard, with the newbie filmmaker telling the outlet, “You can imagine how upset we were and I struck up a friendship with him afterward.” Stewart also commented on the tone of the film, saying that “one of the things that appealed to me about the story is that it does have lighter moments. One of the things that kept Maziar alive was

Every good sitcom has to have a black dude. Or, at least, this seems to be the theory that FOX’s New Girl was working by when, after they lost Damon Wayans Jr. to ABC’s Happy Endings following the filming of their pilot, they dealt with the situation by replacing his Coach character with another black dude named Winston (Lamorne Morris). Since then though, Happy Endings has done well for itself, and – after a period of hanging around the outskirts of the show as the token who the writers didn’t have much for – Morris has found his groove and started getting big laughs on New Girl. So it’s kind of hard to get upset about any perceived racism or whatever. One thing that we can still get upset about, however, is that we never really got the chance to see a couple of comedic talents like Wayans and Jake Johnson play off of each other. They’ve both been great on their respective shows, and it’s kind of hard not to dream about what might have been had they been given a chance to play in the same sandbox. This is the part of the story where there’s good news. Deadline is reporting that Fox has just green lit a new comedy called Let’s Be Cops that’s coming from The Girl Next Door director Luke Greenfield. It’s about two idiot best friends who decide to start impersonating police officers in order to entertain themselves, and – here’s the big news – it’s

According to The Hollywood Reporter, Steven Spielberg will be picking up where Stanley Kubrick left off. Following 2001: A Space Odyssey, Kubrick set out on a compulsive researching mission to make a movie about Napoleon Bonaparte happen. After years of preparing, the filmmaker was turned away from every studio because it would have been a historical epic at a blockbuster price. Turns out that historical fiction wasn’t good business at the time. That the man who just made a hit from Lincoln is picking up Kubrick’s unfinished film and turning it into a television miniseries is a testament to how things can change. The two collaborated once before, with Kubrick creating the concept for Spielberg’s A.I. Artificial Intelligence. Sadly, the iconic director didn’t live to see that film completed either. The world lost him in 1999. It’s a shame that Kubrick never got to make his epic, but there are few names better to take up the torch, craft something astounding and deliver it with fanfare to the biggest crowd possible. At any rate, Spielberg’s working with a script from Kubrick. It doesn’t get much more film geeky than that, even if it’ll never see theaters.

While it’s certainly amusing that one of the projects that Hollywood simply refuses to let die is a film about zombies, the long road to the screen for Pride and Prejudice and Zombieshas been so long and so arduous that it simply doesn’t seem worth it at this point. And yet, this is Hollywood, and the adaptation of Seth Grahame-Smith‘s “novel” does come with a script by David O. Russell and it does fall under the newly-hot “zom-rom-com” genre that moviegoers seem to like these days (thanks, Warm Bodies). So let’s throw some more money at it and hope it all works out. Deadline Hollywood passes along word that Panorama Media has joined the long list of the film’s producers – including Darko Entertainment, Handsomecharlie Films, and producer Allison Shearmur – to give the project (which still doesn’t have a cast or a director) still more money to get made. Money is cool and all, but you know what’s really cool? A director and a cast. The news also assures us that the film is out to potential directors, but considering that Zombies has already cycled through plenty of potential directors – with Craig Gillespie last attached to direct back in August of 2011, and other names like Russell himself and Mike White on board at various points to helm – that doesn’t mean much. At least this is a small piece of good news for a plagued project that, again, still doesn’t have an attached director or any semblance

According to Deadline Hollywood, Focus Features and Playtone are securing the rights to “The Ocean at the End of the Lane,” the new novel from Neil Gaiman. Normally, that would be exciting enough news on its own, but there’s a glimmer of hope that this one won’t sit sadly on a shelf somewhere because Joe Wright is on deck to direct the adaptation. The synopsis of the book from Good Reads: “It began for our narrator forty years ago when the family lodger stole their car and committed suicide in it, stirring up ancient powers best left undisturbed. Dark creatures from beyond the world are on the loose, and it will take everything our narrator has just to stay alive: there is primal horror here, and menace unleashed – within his family and from the forces that have gathered to destroy it. His only defense is three women, on a farm at the end of the lane. The youngest of them claims that her duckpond is an ocean. The oldest can remember the Big Bang.” But you know, it’s the man who made Hanna, Atonement and Anna Karenina taking on a modern literary genius. Do the details really even matter? And when we we getting that “Good Omens” movie anyway?…

It’s been 12 years since Super Troopers launched Broken Lizard, and it’s been 7 years since they proclaimed publicly that a sequel was on the way. Anyone who held their breath is either dead or setting some kind of laudable record by now. For all those who have turned blue, Guy Speed is reporting that, in their interview with Kevin Heffernan, the actor announced that the sequel is likely going to shoot by the end of the year. With all due fairness to the excitement of seeing the gang back on patrol, we’ve heard that the project is close to filming for a long time, and it’s usually come from Heffernan, and this isn’t the first year where he’s claimed they’d make it “by the end of the year.” But usually the story involves a vague legal issue that they’ve been hammering out with Fox. This time, all Heffernan mentions is negotiations on “the time and the place.” As usual, cautious optimism is the key here. But Heffernan also said he was going to start growing his mustache, and maybe that dedication to the cause is reason enough for all of us to get pumped. Now the question is whether the sequel still sees them invading Canada.

Clunky title aside, Craig Brewer‘s next project sounds pretty damn great. Brewer is now set to write and direct an adaptation of Sabrina Rubin Erdely’s Rolling Stone article of the same name, saddling Brewer with The Gangster Princess of Beverly Hills as a title to add to his resume. Let’s shorten that one maybe. The true-life story centers on Lisette Lee, a total nobody who lied and cheated her way into Hollywood by pretending to be an actress, Korean pop singer, professional heiress, Paris Hilton hater, and model – and, yes, while that sounds like something most people in Hollywood already do, Lee topped all of that by adding in another lie, that she was the heir to, of all things, the Samsung fortune. Lee wasn’t any of those things (well, she might have been one of them, guess which!) – she was a drug mule, and all her lies finally came to light when she was found attempting to smuggle some weed into Ohio – five hundred pounds of weed – which ultimately landed her in jail. For Brewer, who last directed Footloose but who is probably best known for fare like Hustle & Flow and Black Snake Moan, this is a great fit for his talents, and we can’t wait to see the final product. You can read the entire Rolling Stone article, originally published on August 31 of last year, right HERE. It is fascinating. [Deadline Hollywood, via ComingSoon]

According to MarketSaw (via Celluloid and Cigarette Burns, who makes a case for the site’s track record of being right), Alfonso Cuaron is in the mix and could be the preferred candidate to direct Star Wars Episode VIII or IX or both. Obviously, this would be awesome. And it would be awesome for the exact two reasons that Cuaron is a viable candidate in the first place. He’s a director with intense cult appeal, geekily built from a talent that blisters eyeballs and bruises jaws. He’s had experience working successfully with a massive franchise aimed at the young and young at heart. But beyond Children of Men and his Harry Potter entry, we’ll get to see Gravity in October (which means we’re getting more Emmanuel Lubezki work too!), where Cuaron goes to space. So you can add that interstellar aspect to the list above. Obviously this isn’t wholly confirmed yet, and probably won’t be for a long time, but the thought of it is huge and perfect. Hopefully it turns out to be true.

If there’s any proof that fate has a sense of humor, it’ll come when Boondock Saints 3 starts rolling its cameras. The first film was a sleeper hit that was so perfect in its ridiculousness and bloodshed that it was impossible for it not to earn a dedicated audience. When a sequel didn’t come, but a lawsuit against Franchise Pictures did, director Troy Duffy became something of a legend. His low budget feature had scored big with video sales, but Duffy was also used as an example of what not to do when finding Hollywood success in the documentary Overnight where he acts like a complete jackwagon to his close friends and business associates. The noise calling for a sequel was deafening, but Duffy was unable to make it happen until ten years later. Unfortunately, Boondock 2: All Saints Day was the terrible kind of ridiculous, and it alienated all but the most hardcore of fans. Still, it also did pretty damned well in video sales. Now that almost  no one is calling for a third entry, star Norman Reedus says it might happen. In an interview with IFC, the actor said, “I’m meeting with Sean [Patrick Flanery] and Troy [Duffy] tonight. I just landed a couple hours ago and tonight I’m going over to Troy’s house with Sean. It’s definitely in the works. Look for it. It’s gonna be crazy.”

Marvel and Joe Johnston did an incredible job with Captain America, making a fun film with a main character that eventually acted as a counterpoint to Tony Stark in The Avengers. Fingers should be crossed that they can manage the same kind of entertainment with The Winter Soldier, but it’s encouraging to see Marvel chief Kevin Feige talk about the movie in terms beyond the overused Superhero Action genre. In a conversation with Variety, he hinted that action won’t be the primary focus. Instead, the sequel will play out more like, say, House of Cards. “There’s an opportunity to graft almost sub-genres onto them. Our first Captain America film was a World War II picture, and the next is a political thriller. They all have their own textures and patinas, and that’s what is exciting about it.” Of course, if the first one was a WWII flick, it certainly had plenty of action to it as a result. A political thriller doesn’t immediately bring action to mind, but it might be a welcome ingredient. Think Captain America by way of The French Connection. Yes, it sounds awesome, and so does this news. Captain America: The Winter Soldier will be in theaters April 4, 2014.

Louis Zamperini has an amazing life story. He ran in the Berlin Olympics of 1936 where he shook Adolf Hitler’s hand because the leader wanted to meet him. He then fought in WWII, flying with  a B-24 bomber in the Pacific Islands before a mechanical failure brought his plane and the 11 men in it down. Only three men survived, Zamperini included, and they ate raw fish and drank captured rain water for 47 days while fighting off shark attacks before washing ashore in the Marshall Islands where they were taken as POWs by the Japanese. Zamperini was torture by one of the 40 most wanted war criminals of the time but survived for two years before finally seeing his release at the end of the war. Oh, and he’s still alive. He’s 96 and, clearly, he cannot be killed.

Author Nicholas Sparks has built an entire empire based on writing books about people who have terminal illnesses falling in love. It turns out he’s not the only guy out there with an interest in cancer romance though, because John Green got into the game with his 2012 novel “The Fault in Our Stars,” and he earned quite a bit of critical acclaim for his efforts. Well, given the quality of the source material, and given the fact that Hollywood has made about a gajillion dollars adapting Sparks’ weepy nonsense into movies, plans are now in the works to make a The Fault in Our Stars movie. According to THR, Fox 2000 is putting the project together with young director Josh Boone on board to helm and Twilight and Safe Haven vets Wyck Godfrey and Marty Bowen on board as producers. Boone is new enough to the game that you probably haven’t heard of him yet, but his debut film as a writer/director, Stuck in Love (formerly Writers), shows a lot of promise for a first time filmmaker and is scheduled for release in the US in April, so chances are you might know who he is soon.

Once upon a time, Leonardo DiCaprio was going to star in a movie about poor people and violent crime. The film was going to be called Out of the Furnace, and it was going to be directed by Ridley Scott. That deal never quite came together though, so eventually the film went to Crazy Heart director Scott Cooper, who rewrote it and recast the lead with Christian Bale. What could have been a missed opportunity is now a movie tentatively scheduled to be released later this year. The fates have conspired to give DiCaprio another chance at making a movie about poor people and violent crime though, and funnily enough this time it comes with Cooper attached as the director. Deadline is reporting that Warner Bros. has acquired the rights to a still-unreleased Michael Armour novel called “The Road Home,” which they’ve got Cooper signed on to direct and are hoping to develop as a starring vehicle for DiCaprio, who already has a producer’s credit on the deal.

Much as we’d like for director Justin Lin to just keep churning out Fast and Furious films forever and ever, the filmmaker appears to have a hankering for a some slightly different fare. Deadline Hollywood reports that the helmer has signed on to direct the big screen adaptation of author Patrick Lee‘s next novel, an untitled action thriller that will kick off a planned three-book series and that doesn’t even release until next winter. While we don’t know much about the project, the outlet does reveal that the book centers on “an ex-special operative named Sam Dryden. In the character-driven thriller, Dryden runs into a mysterious young girl who is not quite what she seems, and he embarks on a journey to keep her safe from a powerful government agent intent on hunting her down.” This could really mean just about anything, but hey, planned thrills! Warner Bros. just picked up the rights for the novel in an apparently heated studio battle. Lee’s first novel, “The Breach,” is also in development, thanks to producers Lorenzo di Bonaventura and David Goyer.

Though Shane Acker hasn’t made a movie since the 2009 adaptation of his own short film, 9, the filmmaker has been steadily lining up new animation projects that have yet to come to fruition just yet. He’s on deck to direct that Thomas the Tank Engine feature and another film called Deep (a submarine adventure, of course), and now he’s added yet another project to his growing slate, one that sounds just adorable. Reel FX has announced today (via ComingSoon) that Acker will direct their untitled CG-animated feature that’s based on the popular Dark Horse Comics series, Beasts of Burden (hey, now there’s an idea for the title, huh, Reel FX?). The film’s script is being penned by Darren Lemke (Turbo, Shrek Forever After).