It’s obviously Mustache Thursdays around here, and in the second piece of facial hair-based news, Variety is reporting that Tom Wilkinson is close to joining Armie Hammer and Johnny Depp in The Lone Ranger. The veteran actor would be playing a “railroad tycoon” which most likely means he’ll be playing a bad guy, unless this story has the Ranger teaming up with a suave businessman to save the town or something. Casting Wilkinson is always a smart move because he can play just about anything and make it sing. Hammer is a strong leading man type, and Depp will most likely be as crazy as he wants to be as Tonto, but this reboot stands out as trading off of name recognition that has nothing to do comic books or plastic toys from the 1980s. It’s a name that appeals to a considerably older crowd, and it might be an effective move to bring in a younger crowd ready for wild west adventure alongside an older generation that remembers the character (or watching reruns of the character on television). It might be a clever move, and the casting is shaping up really well.

Despite reports that The Lone Ranger is looking like it’s going to be a movie that will be featuring it’s title character no more prominently than the former sidekick Tonto, it will still be a huge release with all the power of the Disney marketing machine behind it; so I imagine a lot of actors have been going to bed every night hoping and praying that they would somehow get cast as the masked man. Well, those poor saps can put the rosaries away, because they never had a chance. Armie Hammer has it all locked up. What did you expect? He’s 6’5”, 220, and there’s only one of him. Hammer turned heads playing the Winklevoss twins in last year’s high profile film The Social Network. He managed to catch everybody’s attention not only by being statuesque and charming, but by also playing two roles so convincingly that a lot of people who saw the film thought he must have actually been two people. Just imagine how good he’s going to be when he only has to play one guy. Or don’t imagine. You won’t have to. According to Variety we’ll all find out soon enough, as production on The Lone Ranger is set to start moving forward once Depp finishes shooting on Tim Burton’s Dark Shadows and Hammer completes his work on The Brothers Grimm: Snow White.

Armie Hammer put himself firmly on everyone’s radar last year by playing dual roles as the WInklevoss twins in David Fincher’s The Social Network, and now Lightstream Pictures is putting out word that he has been attached to star in their new thriller 2:22. A lot of people are going to paint this as good news for Hammer’s budding career, but I’m not so sure. First a movie where he is playing twins, and now a film with a bunch of twos in the title? Could this be the early signs of a Number 23 type mental breakdown from Hammer? Or has his career to this point just been viral marketing giving us hints that he will be playing Two-Face in the post Dark Knight Rises Batman reboot? Okay, probably not. But if there are any instances of twos showing up when Hammer appears in Clint Eastwood’s upcoming J. Edgar, then I’m launching a full on investigation.

What is Movie News After Dark? Tonight it’s a movie news column stunned by its author’s ability to find all that is cool and interesting in the world of film. Seriously, this might be the best one of these lot that he’s put together in over 150 tries. It’s almost as if he’s ready to graduate to a “mediocre” rating as a news aggregator. Then he can begin acquiring spells and executing more advanced quests before he can join a proper guild and go on raids. Gore Verbinski may finally have found his Lone Ranger in the form of The Social Network star Armie Hammer. He is currently in talks to take the lead alongside Johnny Depp, who’s already been cast as Tonto. He’s got the look (and damn, the voice as well), but the challenge for Hammer will be the fact that there’s only one character to play in the film. Unless Verbinski carries over the “multiple Jack Sparrow” sequences from his Pirates of the Caribbean work.

One of the “Snow White” projects just got its title character even if it doesn’t have a title yet. Lily Collins – who played Sandra Bullock’s character’s daughter in The Blind Side – will star as the fairest one of all for Relativity Media’s version of the fairy tale being directed by Tarsem Singh. The movie already has Julia Roberts signed on as the Evil Queen who creates the Sleeping Death, and Armie Hammer as the handsome prince who saves the day with a kiss. All of it seems like the formulation of a fairy tale, but Singh is gauranteed to make the thing look eye-bleedingly beautiful even if the story and acting sinks. This might be sacrilege, but I guess I never realized there was much of a story to the story. Snow White is left in the forest, hangs out with a bunch of dwarfs, gets attacked for being too pretty, and then gets kissed, right? Is there really much going on to create a feature narrative here that doesn’t feature a ton of songs? I ask this honestly. [THR]

So that one guy from that one show is going to be playing The Man of Steel, and it’s big news. However, since we live in a beautiful age of information, we can also daydream about the movies that might have been if only that one other guy had been cast instead. In the case of the new Superman, Henry Cavill is taking on the tights, which happens to leave four other actors back out looking for work. Who are they, and would it have mattered who got the job?

As the only literate Reject, it’s my duty to find the latest, the greatest and the untouched classics that would make great source material for film adaptations. I read so you don’t have to. This week, Print to Projector presents the story of an old shipmaster found stabbed to death, a fortune left untouched, and a mystery that would inspire the writings of Edgar Allan Poe and Nathaniel Hawthorne.

Armie Hammer can remember back to his high school days when the craze of Facebook started being whispered around the hallways, and he caved to peer pressure and joined. Now, he’s playing two people in The Social Network with the benefit of some great CGI. Luke Mullen sat down with the star to discuss playing twins, working with David Fincher, and the musical quality of Sorkin’s writing.

Be it good or bad, The Social Network has certainly caused some extreme reactions. It was met with almost universal skepticism when it was first announced and has now seen nearly universal praise leading up to its release in theaters. Initially referred to as “the Facebook movie” in a way clearly meant to belittle it, audiences at early screenings across the country have discovered that description simply isn’t accurate. Is the movie about Mark Zuckerberg and the inception of Facebook? Of course it is.  But to say that this is a detriment to the film’s potential is just plain wrong. The Social Network follows the story of Mark Zuckerberg, a young computer genius attending Harvard University. After breaking up with his girlfriend and some drunken blogging, Mark decides to create a site to rank the sex appeal of Harvard co-eds. He uses his exemplary computer knowledge to download pictures from the online photo catalog’s that each house or dorm at Harvard has for students to get to know one another.  He compiles the photos into a website which he dubs facemash.com similar to hotornot.com where visitors are presented with two pictures and asked to click on the one who they find sexier. The site crashes Harvard’s computer network in a matter of hours, garnering tens of thousands of htis and drawing the ire of the administration. This leads to Mark developing a new website which he calls The Facebook. Eventually changed to just Facebook with the help of Napster-founder Sean