Everybody knows that the world is going to be ending sooner rather than later. Heck, the end of days is getting so close that we’ve been counting down our must-see apocalypse films. But until I watched the trailer for the upcoming comedy Seeking a Friend for the End of the World, it didn’t occur to me how much fun those last few days we all spend on Earth are going to be. I mean, other than when faced with impending asteroid-related doom, when else is a guy like Steve Carell going to get a chance at a girl like Keira Knightley? Stress-induced romantic hook-ups aren’t the only perks of the world ending, either. There’s slacking off at work, taking part in some cathartic looting, and who knows how many other base pleasures to partake in. Heck, this movie sees Patton Oswalt turning into some sort of hedonistic little Satyr, Gillian Jacobs kissing everyone on the mouth, and Connie Britton hosting dinner parties for her single friends. Not only are these all great ideas for how to spend your last days, they’re also glimpses at a movie that seems to have a stellar supporting cast. Check out how the end times might look with the first trailer for Seeking a Friend for the End of the World after the break.

Phil Morrison, the director of June Bug, has another project in the works, and it’s worth noting because it’s going to be starring my two favorite Pauls currently working in Hollywood. Lucky Dog is a comedy about a couple of French-Canadian con men who go in together on a Christmas tree selling scam, despite the fact that their friendship has recently been on the outs. The previously mentioned Pauls are Paul Giamatti and Paul Rudd, both accomplished comedic actors who also bring some dramatic chops to the table. So, the directions this one could go in are myriad. Adding to the intrigue is the news that Sally Hawkins, an actress who has recently been impressing me in movies like Never Let Me Go and Submarine, has also signed on to join the cast. There isn’t any word on what kind of character she will be playing, but is it safe to assume that there might be some sort of love triangle going on among the former friends? Good luck with that one, Giamatti. Rudd is, like, cut. From marble. He’s gorgeous. He’s like this beautiful face and this incredible body, and I genuinely don’t care that he’s kinda lame. And I don’t even care that he cheats on me.

Monty Python veteran Terry Jones has co-written (with Gavin Scott) and will direct a Sci-Fi farce called Absolutely Anything that has been said might be the cause of a mini-Monty Python reunion. Unfortunately, all of the members of the Python crew are no longer with us, but news from Variety says that Jones’ new film is now looking like it will, in fact, manage to get back together at least most of the surviving members. In addition to his own involvement, Jones has already signed up John Cleese, Terry Gilliam, and Michael Palin, and he’s currently negotiating with Eric Idle.

Despite opening to generally poor reviews due to its been there, done that approach to joke crafting and storytelling, The Hangover Part II still got a ton of people out to the theaters and pulled in record amounts of money. You know what that means: The Hangover Part III is now as inevitable as death and taxes. And, sure enough, THR has a report that the principal cast are negotiating as a team to get a deal for a third film in the books. Because of Ed Helms, Zach Galifianakis, and Bradley Cooper’s all-for-one attitude when it comes to negotiating, getting this deal together has taken longer than usual. Their united front is allowing them to demand quite a bit of money to get a third Hangover movie made, and of course the studio has been doing whatever they can to drive that number down. They’re not really in any position of power, however, as a third Hangover is pretty much guaranteed to bring in truckloads of greenbacks, so the actors’ demands that each of them bank $15m a piece to come back and get drunk again are looking like they’re going to be met. Comparatively, each only made $1m for doing the modest budgeted original film.

The concept of satire has been around for a really long time. I’m sure it goes back to some famous Roman or something. But the modern spoof movie as we’ve come to understand it has much more recent roots. Now, by spoof I’m not talking about satire in general, something that comments on familiar tropes, I’m talking about one movie that makes direct references to other, very famous movies. A lot of people trace these things back to the 1980 release Airplane!, a movie that’s still highly regarded and that launched its creators on the path to doing things like Top Secret!, The Naked Gun, and Hot Shots!; all films that are also generally well-regarded among fans of comedies. One spoof that isn’t so fondly remembered is the 1993 film National Lampoon’s Loaded Weapon 1. Its star, Emilio Estevez, got so much crap for starring in what was viewed as a lesser spoof movie, right after his brother did the Hot Shots! movies, that they even had to address the issue in the film. And the director, Gene Quintano, he didn’t go on to do shit. Does this movie deserve the reputation it has for being a bottom tier pretender, though? No way! Have you watched it lately? There’s a lot of good stuff in there.

The last couple weeks have been full of chatter about a sequel to Kristen Wiig’s hugely successful starring vehicle Bridesmaids. It all started when Wiig herself (who also co-wrote the film) said that she wasn’t working on a sequel, and instead was moving on to writing something new. That got us all speculating. Just because she’s not doing the sequel now doesn’t mean she never will, we told ourselves. Then there was the reality that needed to be faced that the studio could try to put together a sequel even if Wiig wasn’t involved. As long as they got breakout star Melissa McCarthy back, fans would probably be more than happy to file back into the theaters for some Wiigless fun, wouldn’t they? But now, after some additional comments Wiig has made on the subject, it’s looking like all the speculation was for naught. McCarthy has gone on record as saying that she would never participate in a sequel that didn’t involve Wiig, so that possibility is out. The only hopes for a sequel then lie in the notion that perhaps Wiig will want to come back to the property after she does something else. But no, that’s not the case. Wiig flat-out told E! at the Golden Globes, “We’re not planning on doing one.”

Not much has been reported about The Descendants director Alexander Payne’s next film, Nebraska. So far the only info floating around the net about it has been a brief plot synopsis and some casting rumors. Last October, we reported on a rumor saying that Payne wants to shoot the movie in black and white, but the studio is requiring him to get a big name in the starring role if he’s going to take a chance on turning off mainstream audiences like that. There’s also some rumors that they’re looking at convincing Gene Hackman to star, but that’s probably a pipe dream. Now that The Descendants has come and gone, however, it’s probably getting to be time for Payne to hunker down and start work on this project in earnest; and ComingSoon sat the man down and had a chat with him about just that. Payne described Nebraska by saying, “It’s a father/son road trip from Billings, Montana to Lincoln, Nebraska, but it gets waylaid at a crappy town in central Nebraska where the father grew up and where he has some old scores to settle.” He went on to explain, “It’s just a little comedy. It’s nothing fancy. Nothing too ambitious. It’s a nice little comedy.” That’s not exactly the most exciting way I’ve ever heard someone describe one of their movies. Payne’s talking to the movie press here, doesn’t he want to build up some buzz?

Despite the fact that it seemed like a pipe dream when the idea was first kicked around, development on a feature film version of the failed Starz sitcom Party Down seems to be chugging along steadily and assuredly. First the movie was just a twinkle in its creators eyes, then things started looking better as everyone involved began synching up their schedules, and now the whole thing appears to be a done deal. At least according to Megan Mullally. At a recent press tour, Mullally answered questions about what she has coming up by saying, “I will be doing the Party Down movie. John [Enbom] is writing it right now.” That’s not exactly new news in itself, we already knew that work was being done on the script; but some of Mullally’s other comments make things sound further along than the last time this project was talked about. First off, Mullally knows some details about where her character is going. She added, “I think we’re going to see Lydia’s ex-husband – Ed I think is name (sic) – who was really racist and a misogynist.” Also, it sounds like financing for the film is all taken care of. Before Enbom started work writing the script proper, Mullally says that he turned in an outline to investors that was “enthusiastically approved.”

There’s a spy comedy in the works over at Disney called The B Team that’s starting to see some life. The film is reportedly about a James Bond-type secret agent who gets himself kidnapped, leaving his nerdy tech support and research team left with the responsibility of rescuing him. Hilarity will doubtless follow as the pudgy, dweeby types try to acclimate themselves to being out in the world doing stuff instead of sitting behind a computer screen, typing things and coloring missions with snarky commentary. The new action regarding the film’s development is that Seth Rogen has been brought on as a producer, which means he’s likely also being looked at to star. This has been Rogen’s modus operandi of late. He’s had a producing hand in a lot of his recent films, including 50/50, The Green Hornet, and Pineapple Express. I guess he’s kind of like the Jay-Z of the comedy world.

College kids are very much focused on and engaged with the present. They know the hippest music that came out this month, they’re passionate as hell about whatever social issue was being talked about on the cable news channels this morning. Talk about something new, and a nineteen-year-old’s eyes light up. But talk about their dad’s favorite music or the social issues the world was going through twenty years ago, and they glaze over. So why can you go in any dorm in the country today and still find someone watching John Landis’s 1978 comedy Animal House? This film is an everlasting staple of college life. The Deer Hunter won Best Picture in 1978, but good luck walking into a college party and trying to get anybody to watch that. But if you tell them you’re popping in a copy of Animal House, they’d be totally cool with it. To a college kid 1994 seems like ancient history. Yet, comparatively, the stuff that was made in 1994 feels much more contemporary than stuff from 1978. So why is it that if you asked a college kid what his favorite line from Animal House is he would probably have an answer, but if you asked him what his favorite line from the 1994 college comedy PCU is, he would look back at you with a blank stare (trust me, I manage college-aged employees at my day job, I do these tests)? PCU resembles current comedies much more than Animal House does [Due to Content Scraping and Theft, we have been forced to try abbreviated feeds. We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause and woud very much appreciate you clicking through to view the full article on FilmSchoolRejects.com]

Despite the fact that they have a go-to wheelhouse of gags that include mostly low-fi special effects, shrill noises, absurdism, and repetition, I find that I never get used to the strange video creations of comedians Tim Heidecker and Eric Wareheim. Every time I sit down to watch an episode of Tim & Eric Awesome Show, Great Job or take a look at a short that they’ve made for the Internet I have a general idea of what’s coming my way, but they always manage to get under my skin again nonetheless. Some people just find the stuff they do to be uncomfortable and weird, other people think that it’s fall down hilarious. Me? I fall somewhere in the middle. I laugh at how uncomfortable and weird they are always able to get, and then I move on. Which is why I was impressed at how much they were able to creep me out in just a few seconds in the teaser trailer for their upcoming film Tim & Eric’s Billion Dollar Movie, which ludicrously claims to be the most expensive movie ever made. A lot of people have been announced as appearing in the new Tim & Eric film, huge names in comedy like Will Ferrell, John C. Reilly, Zach Galifianakis, Will Forte, and Robert Loggia (he had that one orange juice commercial!). But you won’t see any of them appear in this teaser. No, what you’ll see is decidedly…different. You’ll just have to watch yourself.

In today’s world of instant gratification and excess, enough is never enough. So if somebody makes two seasons of a TV show that you really enjoyed, it’s not a blessing that you got to experience the show at all, it’s a tragedy that the show didn’t last for six seasons and a movie. These days if a show gets cancelled or stops production the rumors of a feature film spin-off are inevitable and near-immediate. I blame Firefly for actually getting a post-cancellation movie made. Now TV shows can never rest in peace, we have to hear about the potential Deadwood movie and the potential Arrested Development movie ad nauseam. Today there’s a new show that you can add to the movie rumor pile, because Bret McKenzie just happened to make an offhand comment to a reporter about turning his HBO collaboration with co-star Jemaine Clement and director James Bobin, The Flight of the Conchords, into a feature. “We’re gonna try and do a movie,” he told THR, “We just need a story.”

Prominent producer/writer/director Judd Apatow was recorded while speaking at some sort of L.A. Times sponsored press event recently, and he had some interesting comments about The Academy and how he thinks comedies are treated unfairly at the Oscars. You can head over to 24 Frames to watch the whole thing, or just read below and I’ll give you the gist of what was said. Apatow is of the opinion that there should be a new Oscar category created for “Best Comedy,” much like an Oscar for “Best Animated Film” was created in 2001. His reasoning: “Why not?” Okay, that isn’t his entire reasoning. He goes on to say that because “a comedy has only won Best Picture 5 times in a zillion years” he doesn’t think it would be “screwing up Schindler’s List for Hangover to have its own category.” And he goes even further to say that once a new Comedy category was created the Academy could “get rid of the Key Grip category,” a comment that elicits some boos from a tech-appreciative crowd gathered around the interview area. In response to the booing Apatow explains, “I love the key grips, they do a fantastic job, but in hour four I would rather see Zach Galifianakis show up rather than my friend Curtis.”

Back when he was getting his start torturing celebrities on the Ashton Kutcher produced MTV prank show Punk’d it would have been hard to predict that comedian Dax Shepard would get to where he is today. He’s gone from wearing silly fake mustaches and telling Justin Bieber that his dad died to starring in big Hollywood movies, getting engaged to the criminally hot Kristen Bell, and now even making features of his own. Deadline Milford is reporting that Outrun, a movie that Shepard wrote and directed himself, has been acquired for domestic release by Open Road Pictures. This isn’t just a little project that Shepard made in his backyard either, this is a big comedy with an ensemble cast. Shepard himself stars as an ex-getaway driver who must break out of jail to drive his girlfriend to L.A. so that she can get the job of her dreams, Kristen Bell is playing the girlfriend, Tom Arnold is playing a federal agent on their tail, Bradley Cooper is playing the leader of the gang Shepard used to be a part of, and somehow names like Beau Bridges, Kristin Chenoweth and David Koechner are all involved as well.

Once an actor reaches a certain level of success in the acting world, the next step up the ladder for them is usually to form a production company and start getting their name put on all of their films as producers. It’s kind of like how all of the biggest rappers have a clothing line. Not one to be outdone by rappers, British comedian/actor Russell Brand has his own company named Branded Films, and through it he will be co-producing his next starring vehicle, The President Stole My Girlfriend. Though this seems to be one of those movies with a fairly self-explanatory title, I’ll let Brand explain the film to you himself. When talking about the new movie to The Hollywood Reporter he said, “In this movie, the president steals the girlfriend of a sexy hippie—me, obviously. It was inspired by the night I naively invited [Warners president] Jeff Robinov for dinner.” Random zings to Jeff Robinov aside, The President Stole My Girlfriend was actually written by Matt Portenoy, who recently did a well liked re-write of the in-development Porky’s remake, and who is now making his first big sale with this script going to Brand and his new Warner Bros.-based company.

Billy Wilder’s career is a lengthy one, full of highly acclaimed features. But out of all the great films that he made over the course of forty some years, Some Like It Hot may be the most famous. And when you talk about what his masterpiece was creatively, it’s often mentioned right up there with movies like Sunset Boulevard and The Apartment. But I guess that’s no surprise, it’s got Jack Lemmon and Tony Curtis acting like ladies and Marilyn Monroe slinking around in cocktail dresses. That’s memorable stuff. Ted Kotcheff’s career was a lengthy but unspectacular one. He mostly did TV work and is probably best known for being the guy who directed the original Rambo film First Blood. But what I best remember him for is a movie about two guys and a dead dude called Weekend at Bernie’s. I must have watched it about a million times on HBO when I was growing up. These days, when you mention it, people talk about it like it’s a joke; but I guess that’s because Jonathan Silverman and Andrew McCarthy didn’t quite become Jack Lemmon and Tony Curtis, and Terry Kiser is no Marilyn Monroe.

Last April, an amazing trailer hit the web that was subsequently taken down. While it lasted, it showed Will Ferrell playing a character named Armando Alvarez in a ridiculous Spanish-language film that looked a heck of a lot like one of those super-sexy and deadly dramatic Mexican telenovelas that you can catch on Telemundo during the day. It had comedic actors like Nick Offerman, dramatic actors like Gael Garcia Bernal, and a mocha-skinned (TM Ricky Martin) hottie named Genesis Rodriguez. It instantly became one of my most highly-anticipated films on the release date horizon, but after the trailer got jerked, I had not heard hide nor hair of it. That all changed today when I read a report from THR that Pantelion Films has announced that they have acquired the U.S. distribution rights to the film, and will be putting it out in theaters on March 16, 2012. Pantelion CEO Paul Presburger said of their acquisition, “We cannot imagine a better vehicle than Casa de mi Padre to demonstrate how a Spanish language film can appeal to a broad mainstream audience. We are enthusiastic about joining forces with NALA Films on this project and feel that Will, Matt and Andrew have proven that if it’s funny, we all laugh in the same language.” These are, truly, deeply poetic and moving words from Mr. Presburger. Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to go call my Mexican friend Eric.

A couple weeks ago it was reported that Adam McKay and Will Ferrell’s production company Gary Sanchez had spent about a million dollars to pick up a spec script called He’s F***ing Perfect. Today it was reported by Deadline that actress Emma Stone is negotiating to be in said film, only they’re referring to the project as He’s Fuckin’ Perfect. I’m not sure which is actually the official title of this movie, but it doesn’t matter because there’s no fuckin’ way this thing is getting all the way through development and keeping either. More than likely it will be called something pseudo hip but still generic like He’s the Bomb or Friend Request, so there’s no point debating that issue. The thing to focus on is that Emma Stone would be perfect for this role. The story is about a girl who uses her advanced social media skills to dig up dirt on all of her friends’ loser boyfriends to convince them to dump them. A wrinkle comes when she finds that one of her friends is actually dating the perfect guy, so she uses those same social media skills to figure out what his perfect girl would be, and then become her. Essentially, she’s trying to break people up, and then steal her friend’s boyfriend. What a bitch. That’s not going to be a character that’s easy to like, no matter how funny writer Lauryn Kahn’s script is.

For a while there, whenever somebody talked about the upcoming comedy about dueling magicians, Burt Wonderstone, it was often just viewed as the next starring vehicle for Steve Carell. He’s long been attached to the lead role of an aging illusionist whose less than fresh magic act has lost its steam. The questions of who would play the flashier, younger magician who takes his place in the hearts and minds of magic fans, or who some of the other characters would be, never seemed to get much attention. But once the movie got a director and another re-write, it became time to start filling out the rest of the cast. And they’ve been doing a pretty bang-up job so far. Big names like Jim Carrey and James Gandolfini have been mentioned as negotiating for the film, and at this point are assumed to be on board. Carrey will play the flashier magician to Carell’s outdated dud, and Gandolfini is said to be playing a casino owner. And now, joining those names are a couple more actors that you might have heard of: sex symbols Olivia Wilde and Steve Buscemi. Wilde is negotiating to play the role of Carell’s love interest (yeah, right!), a magician’s assistant who bounces back and forth between his character and Carrey’s. And Buscemi is negotiating to play Carell’s long-time partner, who ends up quitting the act.

After it was announced that David Katzenberg and Seth Grahame-Smith were forming a production company whose first order of business was to develop a sequel to the Tim Burton comedy Beetlejuice, the biggest question on everybody’s mind was whether they would be casting a newer, younger actor in the title role and treating this film as something of a reboot, or if they would be getting Michael Keaton to once again don the zombie makeup and green hair of the iconic ghost with the most. As it turns out, Katzenberg and Grahame-Smith are very wise men who understand that Michael Keaton, quite frankly, is Beetlejuice. It didn’t even feel right when somebody else voiced him for the animated series and I was 8 when I watched that.