What is Casting Couch? It’s tying a nice bow on this work week with casting news concerning lovely ladies like Michelle Yeoh, Olga Kurylenko, and Chloe Moretz. Oh yeah, and there’s some stuff about some dudes in there too. The upcoming adaptation of the Steven Sondheim musical Into the Woods that Rob Marshall has been putting together for Disney hasn’t been too secretive about its casting process. James Corden is rumored to be on board as the film’s lead, the Baker, we know for sure that mega-stars Johnny Depp and Meryl Streep are signed for sizzle roles as the wolf and the witch, and we even recently learned that Chris Pine and Jake Gyllenhaal are close to landing the roles of a couple of bumbling princes. But the one key ingredient that’s always been missing is who’s going to play the female lead, the Baker’s wife. Until now. Variety is reporting that Emily Blunt is finalizing a deal to take the role, and —oh man—does that super-talented angel coming on board instantly make this movie that much more appealing or what? The Wrap has a report that the delightful Christine Baranski may soon be getting an offer to join as well, but let’s take these things one step at a time.

Unlike a lot of actors, Aaron Eckhart maintains a great balance of starring in indies and blockbusters – muse to Neil LaBute, he appeared in his films In the Company of Men and Your Friends and Neighbors as well as starring as Harvey “Two Face” Dent in Christopher Nolan’s blockbuster The Dark Knight. He also has a chin dimple that rivals Cary Grant’s, which can never be a bad thing. For his latest film, Olympus Has Fallen (directed by Antoine Fuqua), Eckhart gets back into blockbuster mode as the recently widowed President Asher, who is held hostage in the White House by a terrorist group. While his former Secret Service Agent/boxing buddy Mike (Gerard Butler) infiltrates the White House in hopes of saving the day, the President never backs down, even while being held hostage. Eckhart talked with us about his everyman approach to playing the President, the fallout of his character in The Dark Knight, potential upcoming collaborations with LaBute, and a possible name for his autobiography.

Gerard Butler has rocked out to Andrew Lloyd Weber jams in The Phantom of the Opera. He had movie audiences screaming “This is Sparta!” And he’s also played his fair share of romantic comedy leads. Though Butler tests his boundaries in his latest film Olympus Has Fallen, both producing the film and starring as Mike Banning, a former Secret Service Agent who pretty much single-handedly takes on a group of terrorists who have hijacked the White House. Directed by Antoine Fuqua (Training Day), Olympus Has Fallen chronicles Mike’s journey as he makes the choice of saving the President of the United States (Aaron Eckhart) instead of the First Lady (Ashley Judd) when they get into a car crash one snowy evening. Six months later, Mike is no longer in the Secret Service, but he finds himself back in action when the White House is taken over, and he seems to be the only man to take care of business. Butler sat down with us to chat about the extensive research that he put into the film, as well as whether or not he would try his hand at starring in another musical, and what it was like to tackle Shakespeare in Coriolanus.

What if I told you that the new Gerard Butler film is like ‘Die Hard in the White House’ in more than just a generic ‘Die Hard in/on/at a…’ kind of way? Or that it features the highest, bloodiest, most ridiculous onscreen body count in an action film since Sylvester Stallone’s Rambo? Or that it’s the most purely entertaining film of Butler’s career? Or that the damn thing is a ton of fun? It’s all true… but none of it means there aren’t some incredibly unfortunate elements in Olympus Has Fallen too. Mike Banning (Butler) is head of the president’s (Aaron Eckhart) secret service protection detail, but an accident resulting in lost lives sees him reassigned to a desk job down the street at the U.S. Treasury building. When dozens of well-armed and highly organized North Korean terrorists attack the White House 18 months later the formerly disgraced agent becomes the president’s, and America’s, greatest hope. (Good thing they don’t know he’s actually Scottish.)

Although Olympus Has Fallen foolishly begins with Aaron Eckhart playing the president, it eventually rights this wrong by replacing him with Morgan Freeman, the true ruler of this great nation. All it takes is a terrorist takeover of the White House. Luckily, we have Gerard Butler on the inside and presidential succession on the outside to ensure that the bad guys won’t win. This one from Antoine Fuqua is the first of two “White House being taken over while a secret service agent is the only hope” movies we’ll see this year. It hits in March, and Roland Emmerich’s version, White House Down, hits in June. Hopefully we’ll get a trailer for that soon so we can compare, but check out the aggressively average look at Olympus for now:

The romantic comedy genre is a very forgiving place for performers and filmmakers. Rom-coms are relatively cheap to produce, and like horror films (which are far cheaper) they usually get a guaranteed audience on opening weekend, so it’s not uncommon to see actors and actresses on the downward slide in Hollywood find a home there. (The reverse works too, with actors on the rise getting a bump from a successful but otherwise low-key rom-coms.) The point is it’s always interesting to see who turns up in a romantic comedy that hits theaters with no expectations. George (Gerard Butler) was a big time soccer (the football kind) player once upon a time, but an ankle injury saw an end to his career and his stardom. His family also fell by the wayside at some point, but now he’s moved to the same town as his wife Stacie (Jessica Biel) and son Lewis (Noah Lomax) in the hopes of reconnecting with them both. He’s working towards a sportscasting career but takes a gig coaching Lewis’ soccer team while he waits for a call from ESPN. George tries to rekindle a life with his wife and son, but his recurring reckless behavior, the horn-dog soccer moms and Stacie’s Baxter of a fiance (James Tupper) may just derail his dream.

What is Casting Couch? It’s where Hollywood moms come every day to find out if their actor kids have gotten a job. Remember that movie about the day JFK got shot that Tom Hanks was putting together because these days he’s such a history loving, lame dad? It’s called Parkland, and it just put together an awesome cast. According to Collider, director Vincent Bugliosi has signed the terrific trio of Paul Giamatti, Jackie Weaver, and Billy Boy Thornton to headline the cast. There’s no word on what characters they’ll be playing, but my guess is Giamatti will be JFK, Thornton will be Jackie O, and Weaver will be Lee Harvey Oswald. Makes sense, no?

A few years back, Greg Silverman at Warners offered emerging screenwriter Chad St. John the job of writing a revenge movie that didn’t have any dialogue in it. St. John was up to the challenge, and he returned with an impressive screenplay that had less than a dozen lines of spoken words in just over 70 pages – most of which come right at the end. It’s been on the Black List since 2009, but even after going through a difficult menu of leading men (before landing on Gerard Butler), the film was set to actually happen soon. According to Deadline Hollywood, that’s no longer the case. Production has shut down, and the crew was told to go home. Apparently the independent production houses in charge – Envision Entertainment, Foresight Entertainment, and Emmet/Furla Films – could not meet the Warner Bros. imposed (via Dark Castle) drop-dead delivery date of March 31, 2013, as it would have meant only having 12 weeks of post-production. Without the domestic release, the foreign distribution was in question, and the film was unable to secure a bond. So that’s the ball game. It’s definitely an ambitious concept, so it’s even more of a shame that it got this close to rolling only to send the cameras back. With any hope, they’ll be able to regroup, work out a new schedule, and make this happen.

Let’s take this moment to recount the many actors who have been attached to star in Albert Hughes‘ Motor City. First, Dominic Cooper was set as the lead, then he left and Jake Gyllenhaal looked poised to step in, and then ol’ Gylley left and Gerard Butler swooped in for the role. Along the way, other names like Chris Evans and Jeremy Renner were mentioned for the lead, and even Mickey Rourke got some buzz earlier this summer when he was mentioned for an undisclosed role. Yet, despite all that upheaval, co-stars Amber Heard and Gary Oldman have managed to stay consistently attached for months. Well, scratch that. A new report from Variety passes along word that Adrien Brody is now in negotiations for the villain role that Oldman had been set to play. This, in turn, leads us to an under-reported bit (also from Variety, via The Playlist) from way back in June that notes that both Oldman and Heard had left the project. Hughes better get moving on finding a new leading lady for Butler, who will play a newly-released felon bent on revenge in the Chad St. John script, as the film is set to start shooting on September 17th in Atlanta. Motor City is expected to be released next April.

What is Movie News After Dark? It’s the nightly movie news column that cares… We begin this evening with an image from “Behind the Hollywood Sign,” a photo project from photographer Ted VanCleave that takes you up close and personal with Hollywood’s mountain-top moniker. It’s a gorgeous set of photos by any standard, and a great look at one of the iconic markers of the film industry.

Let’s talk about what Playing For Keeps has going for it. It has a somewhat okay director in Gabriele Muccino (The Pursuit of Happyness). It has a talented cast with Gerard Butler, Jessica Biel, Catherine Zeta-Jones, Uma Thurman, Dennis Quaid, and Judy Greer. It has a script from the guy who wrote So I Married An Axe Murderer (that is a plus, because that film is still funny). But it’s also directed by the guy who directed Seven Pounds (schmaltz, sap, with added jellyfish). And it only imagines that Butler is capable of playing a soccer-playing lothario and that Zeta-Jones can only be a deranged maneater. And, yeah, it also comes to us with a script by the guy who has only a story by credit on, of all things, In the Army Now. Let’s take it to the trailer!

If you thought that the last scene in Kathryn Bigelow’s legendary bank-robbing-surfers movie Point Break was the coolest presentation of big wave riding that was ever going to be put on film…well, you were probably right. But just because it was the best word doesn’t mean it has to be the last word. So now we’ve got Chasing Mavericks, a Gerard Butler- and Jonny Weston-starring film that tells the true story of how surfing legend Jay Moriarty learned to ride a board on top of ridiculously big walls of water. Like most true stories about an underdog chasing an impossible dream, Chasing Mavericks looks pretty cheesy. All of the standard tropes are there: the tenuous relationship with an initially gruff mentor, the training montage sequences, the budding romance with an energetic blonde. But, before you dismiss this movie outright and go watch The Karate Kid for the thousandth time, note that there are a couple reasons why you might want to give it a chance.

On one side, we have Roland Emmerich, Channing Tatum, and Jamie Foxx. On the other, we have Antoine Fuqua, Gerard Butler, and Aaron Eckhart. In the middle? Similarly themed and plotted films that have (apparently) both been deemed “Die Hard in the White House.” Choose a side now or…choose one later when the films are actually made? Variety reports that Eckhart has now joined the cast of Fuqua’s film, Olympus Has Fallen in the role of President of the United States (that’s the Jamie Foxx role, for those of you still trying to keep track). Eckhart’s good locks and lantern jaw seem pretty classically presidential, which is fair enough, because Emmerich’s White House Down is obviously going for awesome, ass-kicking points with Foxx.

True-life American military tales are gunning for a real resurgence lately – what with Ben Affleck’s Argo, Kathryn Bigelow’s Zero Dark Thirty, and the Robert Pattinson-starring Mission: Blacklist – and it looks like that means we’re not safe from a 3D take on such projects. A morning press release out of the Cannes Film Festival (oh, and heads up, get ready for a metric ton of these in the coming days) reveals that Freedom Films and Paradox Entertainment have made a deal to produce the “epic action pic Thunder Run,” based on the book “Thunder Run – The Armored Strike to Capture Baghdad.” In case that title doesn’t quite clue you in on the film’s subject matter, it will detail “the untold story of the dangerous and bloody capture of Baghdad by American Forces at the onset of the Iraq War. In April 2003, three battalions and fewer than a thousand men launched a violent thrust of tanks and Bradley Fighting Vehicles into the heart of a city of five million, igniting a three-day blitzkrieg, which military professionals often refer to as a lightning strike, or ‘thunder run.’” Despite the fact that the film’s producers are already flashing about its 3D bent and terming it an “epic,” Thunder Run is coming at us (really, right at our faces) with a solid action pedigree. Simon West (The Expendables 2, Con Air) will direct from a script by Robert Port and Ken Nolan (Black Hawk Down), who are adapting from the book

Today is Mother’s Day. Don’t worry, we’ll wait while you go and pick up that last minute gift (Amazon gift cards are great at this point) and take a few moments to call your mom and tell her you love her. It’s something that I did earlier today, taking a few moments to check in with the most important lady around, my Mom. And while talking to Mom meant explaining why I don’t call so often and hearing gossip about all the family members I call even less, it also meant talking about our latest favorites in the world of film and television. Because that’s what we do, Mom and I. We talk about the shows we’re watching, she asks me about the movies she should see in theaters and I implore her to read the Game of Thrones books because they are so much better than those Sookie Stackhouse books she reads. This is my relationship with my beloved mom, we share experiences over the 1,400 mile gap between Austin, TX and Cleveland, OH. We used to do the same thing when I was a kid, and the gap was the 30 feet between my room and my parents’ bedroom. We’ve always just liked watching movies together. I’ve long held to the notion that it wasn’t comic books or anti-socialism that got me into the world of pop culture, it was my Mom. So on Mom’s day, I’d like to take a moment to celebrate her favorites in our weekly

Just last week, we were hit with the cataclysmic news that Roland Emmerich was likely to return to one of his favorite cinematic pastimes – blowing the White House the eff up – in the new, amusingly titled film White House Down. Turns out, that wasn’t the only script with a vendetta against 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. bouncing around Hollywood, and Emmerich, scribe Jamie Vanderbilt, and Columbia are just going to have to man up and deal with some similar competition. THR reports that director Antoine Fuqua currently has an offer to direct Nu Image/Millennium’s Olympus Has Fallen, an action thriller that the outlet is billing as “Die Hard in the White House.” Make this film now. The film’s script was penned by newbie scribes Creighton Rothenberger and Katrin Benedikt, who sold it to Millennium about a month ago. The film centers on “an unlikely Secret Service agent” (aren’t they always) who is the only man standing in the way of terrorists who have seized the Presidential residence and workspace. White House Down also centers on a White House takeover, but which film will emerge victorious?

Albert Hughes‘s next film (sorry, Akira remake that I pray to God never happens), Motor City, has been spinning its wheels for months now, mainly because it’s been unable to hold on to a leading man. The film has had a number of hot names attached to it for its male lead – including Dominic Cooper, Jake Gyllenhaal, Jeremy Renner, and Chris Evans – but none of them has stuck, with scheduling conflicts often to blame. The film is a somewhat interesting one, a sort of standard issue revenge story that could be spiced with some stylistic flash and a solid cast, and it centers on a recently-released criminal who goes after the people who put him in the big house. With Cooper, Gyllenhaal, Renner, and Evans all of the table, Variety now reports that Gerard Butler is in negotiations with Warner Bros. and Dark Castle to star in the film. He would star alongside Amber Heard (who has managed to stay attached the film through other casting woes) and Gary Oldman (the principal villain). While he’s a bit older than Cooper and Gyllenhaal, Butler certainly has the grit and brawn to bring a revenge-set criminal to life, so let’s hope this latest casting works out.

What is Movie News After Dark? After a whirlwind of SXSW action, it doesn’t even know anymore. Something about movie news. Interesting links, maybe. There may also be some fart jokes, but we’re trying to keep it classy. Hi, Mom! Also, tonight’s edition will prove how much this column’s author has been watching Cougar Town lately. Like Community‘s Abed Nadir, he would like to live in Cougar Town. We begin tonight with a picture of Katee Sackhoff in Riddick 3 (ooh, la la — for the Battlestar Galactica babe, not another Riddick sequel). She will apparently play the baddie in the Vin Diesel-led film, some sort of alien bounty hunter who is more than meets the eye. Random thought: When are Katee Sackoff and Busy Philipps (Cougar Town reference #1) going to get together and do a sexy twins buddy cop movie? Strong female leads, people. Come on, Hollywood!

You’d think the words “Gerard Butler” and “diamond heist flick” would spell out something fantastic, but in the case of Robert Luketic‘s Brilliant, they seem to signal something less than shiny. Butler has just replaced a previously in-negotiations Eric Bana to star in the film (and that’s already a black mark against it in my book, I’d much rather watch Bana on screen than Butler), which will be directed by his The Ugly Truth helmer. Yeah, that’s not good. Variety reports that Brilliant centers on “a small-time criminal who partners with a female thief to pull off a daring diamond heist.” While that’s certainly a fun premise, the closest that Luketic has come to a heist flick is 2008′s missed opportunity 21. And the film’s screenwriter will be of little help when it comes to crime expertise, as the film is writer Gillian Gorfil‘s first project.

Let me start by confessing that I was a Theater and English major and have spent much of my academic career studying the works of the bard. William Shakespeare‘s plays were written as entertainment for the everyman and perhaps it does say quite a bit for the dumbing down of human civilization that work once enjoyed by the average Elizabethan “Joe” is now considered incomprehensible – but that doesn’t mean they are incomprehensible. Shakespeare’s been ruined for too many people who sat through interminable high school classes listening to their peers try to read it out loud. Director and star Ralph Fiennes has made his Coriolanus, one of Shakespeare’s lesser known plays, very accessible and very relevant. Maybe because I live in the land of Occupy Wall street, but scenes of heavily armed police ready to bash citizen protesters are chilling for me. There’s nothing really foreign about the language of the film (lifted straight from the stage play); it is still English for goodness sakes. Sometimes, it is a good thing for people to stretch their brains and challenge their minds. Yet, even so, the poetry of the film is used in a very natural way, making it very accessible to an audience not familiar with it. The story is hardly tough to follow, and the updating of the setting is not only effective, but really makes knowledge of Roman history unnecessary. The rise and fall of a stubborn, powerful man who seeks revenge against those who betrayed him