What is Casting Couch? Today it’s mostly about smaller-name actors getting roles in upcoming projects, but that can be interesting too. Not everyone can be an old favorite coming back to an X-Men movie or getting hounded about the new Star Wars. It’s been known for a while that Mad Men’s Jon Hamm is a big fan of comedy—just look at how many lowly podcasts he’s appeared on, bit parts in comedies, and even his SNL host gigging for proof of that—but he’s yet to get his chance to take his love of the yuks further and actually star in a comedic feature. That might soon change though. Variety is reporting that he’s currently circling a project called Epic Fail that’s about a down-on-his-luck high school teacher who hires two students to kidnap his wife, in the hopes that if he swoops in and rescues her he might rekindle his marriage. The film has been written by Kevin Costello and will be directed by Mark Teitelman.

It must feel pretty good to be Christopher McQuarrie right now. The writer/director has Jack Reacher coming out in a month’s time, which is hopefully as cool as the footage we’ve seen, but that’s not the only reason McQuarrie must be pleased with himself. With the big promotional push for a risky Christmas Day release, Paramount is putting a lot of confidence into McQuarrie’s movie. Now, with news of the Usual Suspects writer in line to helm Mission: Impossible 5, the studio clearly wants to stay in the McQuarrie business. And good for him. Ever since The Way of the Gun, he’s been stuck in director’s jail, or at least it seemed that way. His excellent, overlooked directorial debut was critically divisive and far from a box office hit. His lack of directorial work doesn’t mean he hasn’t been keeping busy, though. Over the past few years he’s struck a good working relationship with Tom Cruise, and after Jack Reacher, it’s apparently gotten better.

Tom Cruise is doing something very mech-warrior in Doug Liman’s upcoming actioner All You Need Is Kill. And to think that no one thought of giving him some bionic stilts to make him taller for Jack Reacher. Reshoots, anyone? (via ScreenCrush)

Lee Child has published seventeen novels with lead character Jack Reacher, and this December one of them will finally be hitting the big screen. Reacher was a military policeman once upon a time, but just because he no longer carries a badge doesn’t mean he’s forgotten wrong from right. Now he wanders the nation from one state to the next, and like Bruce Banner and Sam Beckett before him he helps those unable to help themselves. “One Shot” (renamed simply Jack Reacher for the movie) is the ninth book in the series and sees him investigating a mass shooting in Middle America and the man arrested for the crime. Reacher has some very specific characteristics, mostly focused on his size, that should have realistically precluded any actor under 6’3″ from playing him onscreen. Hollywood though is a magical place where respect for the written word isn’t always a priority, so Tom Cruise was cast in the role. Cruise, as we all know, stands 3’7″ which led to a fair amount of bitching and moaning online about his giant ego in a tiny body ruining such a kick-ass literary character. But books and movies are two different mediums, and changes big and small are inevitable when adapting between them meaning the resulting films should be judged on their own merits. We got a glimpse of those merits with the first teaser back in July, but today the full trailer has dropped offering us a look at the story, writer/director Christopher McQuarrie‘s sense

Snow White and the Huntsman may have been a moderate hit this summer, though it was probably not the huge success Universal was hoping for. That, along with the picture’s critical lashing, hasn’t stopped the studio from wanting to stay in the Rupert Sanders‘ business, a.k.a dull and overly serious action pictures. Word is Sanders may be brought in to helm the Tom Cruise-starring Van Helsing reboot, which is expected to have a more “modern” approach. With writers Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman involved, modern usually just means really, really safe. You can always expect some goofiness with those two, but if Sanders does indeed take on the project, I’m sure he’ll see no place for that kind of fun. The strange thing is, when you have someone as charismatic as Tom Cruise in the lead, why hire a director who probably won’t capitalize on that charisma? Perhaps this is a close-minded take on Sanders as a director, but it’s clear the studio wants what he brought to Snow White, which was not much more than pretty, empty shots. [Twitch]

Bill Paxton has had a career for the ages. He’s taken multiple beatings at the hands of Arnold Schwarzenegger, he’s played cowboy with Kurt Russell, played astronaut with Tom Hanks, and even fought off aliens with Sigourney Weaver. One thing he’s never gotten a chance to do is share scenes with fellow superstar Tom Cruise, though, so the actor has decided to go back to his alien killing ways in order to make that happen. Variety is reporting that Paxton is in negotiations to become the latest name to join director Doug Liman’s (The Bourne Identity) upcoming, Japanese graphic novel adapted feature, All You Need is Kill. The basic story here is a kind of mix between Starship Troopers and Source Code, in that Cruise is playing a soldier in a war against aliens who keeps reliving the day he’s killed over and over again. As time keeps looping, and as Cruise keeps re-experiencing his death, he slowly learns from his mistakes and becomes a better soldier. It’s like if you gave Bill Murray’s character from Groundhog Day a big gun and told him to focus on fending off an alien invasion instead of buying Michael Shannon tickets to Wrestlemania.

These days you can’t chuck a cat without hitting a piece of gossip about actress Katie Holmes’ personal life, but all of that domestic drama doesn’t mean that she’s going to be taking a step back from her career or shying away from life in the public eye. Quite the opposite really, in the wake of a recent divorce she seems to be redoubling her efforts in the movie business and doing whatever she can to kick-start the second phase of her career. To that end she has co-wrote, is co-producing, and will star in a new movie called Molly, the particulars of which could be earning it quite a bit of coverage in the mainstream media sometime soon. Molly, which People Magazine says is set to begin production in New York City next week, details the life of a single mother who has to deal with the hectic schedule of raising a daughter on her own. While this is a simple story that would have seemed innocuous enough a couple of weeks ago, given the fact that Holmes is currently divorcing her husband, Tom Cruise, and seeking custody of their young daughter, soon it will very likely be a case of life imitating art.

While we may always wonder what a Jack Reacher film would look like with a star who actually fits the description of the character from Lee Child‘s popular book series (you know, “a giant, standing at 6′ 5″ tall with a 50-inch chest, and weighing between 210 and 250 pounds…Reacher is strong enough to break a man’s neck with one hand and kill a villain with a single punch to the head or chest”), star Tom Cruise seems pretty determined to get down to the neck-cracking, despite his smaller frame. In the film’s first teaser trailer, Cruise’s Reacher breaks approximately one bone every twenty seconds (you know, other people’s bones – it doesn’t look like Reacher can even bleed), and no matter how disgusting the necessary sound effects are, it’s a riveting little bit of marketing. See just how much Jack Reacher doesn’t care about the law (and does care about cracking skulls), after the break.

What is Movie News After Dark? It’s a “a sleazy, slimy, adolescent, over-sexed, over-paid, blowhole!” Or at least that’s how it all works out in the version written by Aaron Sorkin. If the man decides to write it, we’ll take it. We begin this evening with an image of Christian Bale looking rather dour as Bruce Wayne in The Dark Knight Rises, a film the Los Angeles Times says should open in the area of $200 million dollars. The fact that it’s tracking for big numbers comes as a surprise to no one. Chris Nolan’s final Batfilm has been the movie of the year from day one. So smile, Mr. Wayne, it’ll all be over soon.

When director Joseph Kosinski revived Disney’s sci-fi classic TRON with the belated but visually dazzling 2010 sequel TRON: Legacy, the results were a mixed bag to say the least. One thing that pretty much everyone could agree upon when it came to that film, however, is that the score by French electronic group Daft Punk was the best thing it had going for it. Eschewing a traditional film score in favor of the pulsing, electronic sounds of Daft Punk worked wonders when it came to bringing the world of TRON to life and really making it hum, and it’s not hard to imagine that the film could have been far less effective without such a perfect marriage of image and sound. TRON: Legacy isn’t the only film that’s gone the nontraditional route when it comes to finding its music in recent years, either. From Radiohead’s Jonny Greenwood scoring Paul Thomas Anderson movies, to Nine Inch Nails’ Trent Reznor scoring David Fincher films, to The Chemical Brothers providing the music for Joe Wright’s Hanna, bringing a mainstream musician in to score your film instead of hiring one of the well-established film score composers seems to have become a full-scale trend, and a trend that has so far provided us with some amazing music. Since it worked for him once, Kosinski is looking to go back to that well for his next sci-fi adventure, Oblivion. The Playlist reports that in order to find the musical accompaniment for this Tom Cruise-starring tale of

The Wikipedia page for Lee Child‘s Jack Reacher character informs readers that Reacher, former Army Military Police Major, lone wolf, and total badass “is a giant, standing at 6′ 5″ tall with a 50-inch chest, and weighing between 210 and 250 pounds. He has ice-blue eyes and dirty blond hair. He has very little body fat, and his muscular physique is completely natural…He is exceptionally strong but is not a good runner. Reacher is strong enough to break a man’s neck with one hand and kill a villain with a single punch to the head or chest. In a fight against a 7 foot, 400 lb steroid-using thug, Reacher was able to lift his opponent into the air and drop him on his head.” Of course, Reacher is being played by Tom Cruise in the upcoming adaptation of the Child book “One Shot,” now just titled Reacher. Cruise, at the very least, has blue eyes. While it’s easy enough to mock the choice of Cruise for this highly psychical role (easy enough that this very article has done it at least twice already), buzz about the film has been strong, and screenwriter and director Christopher McQuarrie remains confident that Cruise is the right man for the job. So, of course, here comes the world’s first look at Cruise as Reacher, and he’s…standing in front of a car? Cool.

Broadway shows haven’t always made the smoothest of transitions to the big-screen, but Adam Shankman’s Rock of Ages delivers an adaptation that’s bizarre and its own sexually-suggestive summer feature: from showcasing star Tom Cruise’s bare ass to backing Cruise’s choice of venue for an out-there rendition of Foreigner’s “I Want to Know What Love Is” – Malin Akerman’s posterior – Shankman takes the material and stuffs as much as he can into it. These choices represent the work he hopes to keep making – distinctive and not what most would consider to be the norm, box office be damned. Shankman’s been enough of a commercial hitmaker throughout his career to earn the freedom to make those oddball choices, having cranked out a series of box-office success, from Bringing Down the House all the way to The Pacifier. As Shankman tells us, those gems are the type of learning experiences which led him to making Rock of Ages and Hairspray. Here’s what Adam Shankman had to say about the journey from Juilliard to Rock of Ages, how a work for hire can be more informative than a passion project, and highlighting how enthusiasm can make up for – or even overshadow – hard-won experience:

Being a child of the ’80s and a pre-adolescent product of rock n’ roll’s most fashion-concerned era (you would, in no way, find pictures of me at age six with self-slit blue jeans) Rock of Ages should have been a warm-hearted nostalgia trip for me to a time where bad boys wore girl’s aerobic outfits underneath leather jackets with sapphires and rhinestones, girls had poodle ‘fros and chewed lots of bubble gum, and we both bonded over our love for all songs that just said rock a lot; and the more often the word was repeated in the song the more it was good. Having been adapted from a popular stage production, and helmed by a director who did a splendid job with Hairspray, I expected a tongue-in-cheek romp that would have me struggling to refrain from jumping out of my seat and throwing my fists in the air chanting that I wasn’t gonna take it. After about ten minutes I really was struggling to refrain from jumping out of my seat and throwing my fists, because I really wanted to stop taking it.

So, Dear Reader, you’re totally pumped to see Rock of Ages when it opens this weekend? You think it’s going to be pretty rad? Oh, that’s excellent. Good for you. Have a blast. I’m staying home because it looks like the kind of moronic twaddle that I can’t even enjoy on an ironic level. I’ll just kick back and watch me some Born on the Fourth of July because there’s only one kind of Tom Cruise I enjoy and that’s the balding, scruffy, three-sheets-to-the-wind, blubbering-like-a-toddler and lamenting-his-permanent-erectile-dysfunction kind. Hold up. Did I hear you say…Bazelli? As in Bojan Bazelli? As in one of the greatest DPs of our time? He shot Rock of Ages? Hmm. Well…I’m still not interested, although I’m sure Rock of Ages will look fantastic. Yep. I’ll just stay home, sippin’ on my jug of butterscotch schnapps and reveling in my favorite Bazelli-lensed memories. For instance, how about:

The Mayans, the wise race of ancients who created hot cocoa, set December 21st, 2012 as the end date of their Calendar, which the intelligent and logical amongst us know signifies the day the world will end, presumably at 12:21:12am, Mountain Time. From now until zero date, we will explore the 50 films you need to watch before the entire world perishes. We don’t have much time, so be content, be prepared, be entertained. The Film: Jerry Maguire (1996) The Plot: High-powered sports agent Jerry Maguire (Tom Cruise) thinks he has it all figured out – cool job, sweet pad, hot fiancee – but a late night surge of inspiration hits him like a ton of bricks. Jerry has been doing it wrong. We’ve all been doing it wrong. Instead of shaking off his doubts, Jerry puts pen to paper and crafts a “mission statement.” Which he then distributes to his entire company. And then he gets fired. Left with nothing but a starry-eyed accountant (Renee Zellweger, in her most charming role ever, hands down), her brainiac kid (Jonathan Lipnicki, forever ensuring that audiences everywhere know how much the human head weighs), and one completely batshit client (Cuba Gooding, Jr., who won a goddamn Oscar for his work as Rod Tidwell), Jerry has to figure out if his mission statement is really worth living or if he’s thrown away everything for meaningless twaddle.

After weeks of speculation, Paramount has finally fired the shot that someone, somewhere might actually care about – their adaptation of Lee Child‘s novel “One Shot” will not be called One Shot, but just Jack Reacher, after the character it chronicles. Tom Cruise stars in the film, directed by Christopher McQuarrie, which centers on a badass ex-military cop named, uh, Jack Reacher, who is the star of sixteen of Child’s thrilling and popular novels. Cruise has come under fire for his casting, particularly because Reacher’s big build is a large part of his identity – in the books, he’s described as being a hulking 6’5″ beast – but the actor has repeatedly sounded off about the role and his take onit. However, previews of some of the film’s footage have played quite well, so it’s possible that Cruise has made the role his own and will dash any misgivings when it hits screens later this year, on December 21st.

There’s no shortage of complaining about Hollywood’s over-reliance on remakes in the film blogging world, but that’s probably because there’s no shortage of new remakes being proposed either. And this latest one, it just feels like somebody’s messing with us. Variety reports that MGM is dipping into their back catalogue and pulling out The Magnificent Seven as a new starring vehicle for Tom Cruise. The Magnificent Seven was a 1960 cowboy film directed by John Sturges that starred names like Yul Brynner, Steve McQueen, James Coburn, and Charles Bronson, and the fact that it’s being remade by MGM is especially egregious for several reasons. The most obvious of which is that the original Magnificent Seven was already a remake of sorts, as it took the plot of Akira Kurosawa’s classic 1954 film Seven Samurai and transplanted it into a Western setting. But that’s not the real reason this plan is so insulting.

What is Movie News After Dark? This week it’s a series of second stringer fill-ins trying not to run things into the ground while regular columnist Neil Miller disappears for a while due to reasons both glamorous and mysterious (in true Lohan fashion, he’s cited both “exhaustion” and “being dehydrated”). And today it’s a laundry list of Internet people still crushing on Joss Whedon’s superhero extravaganza, The Avengers, because Tim Burton’s Dark Shadows shit the bed this weekend and we haven’t had anything shiny to come along to steal away our fickle attentions yet. Let’s get to it. The above image comes from an artist named Hannah, who has proven that her finger is firmly on the pulse of the Internet by paying tribute both to the death of beloved children’s author Maurice Sendak as well as the work of beloved nerd-God Joss Whedon by mashing up Sendak’s artistic style with the cast of The Avengers. Is cute, no?

It’s easy to have a knee-jerk reaction to news of remakes and reboots because most film-goers would prefer to see original material hitting the screen. And yes, most reboots are unecessary cash-grabs that ultimately pale beside the original. But sometimes you need to pause, take a breath and take a look at the details. Variety is reporting that Alex Kurtzman and Roberto Orci are developing a reboot of Van Helsing with Tom Cruise attached in the title role. (Cruise has actually been circling the project since 2010 when Guillermo del Toro was toying with the character.) It’s part of the duo’s new two-year deal with Universal where they’ll also be overseeing a reboot of The Mummy. Note the common thread of director Stephen Sommers’ past films which means a reboot of Deep Rising can’t be far behind. So the bad news is that they’re remaking an absolutely terrible movie that’s only eight years old. And the good news? They now have the chance to get it right.

Lee Child‘s Jack Reacher series of novels continue to hit the bestseller lists, and this December they’ll get their first crack at the box office when One Shot hits theaters. The film is about an ex-MP who gets caught up in murder investigation when a military sniper kills five seemingly random civilians. The film is written and directed by Christopher McQuarrie (The Usual Suspects, The Way of the Gun) and co-stars Richard Jenkins, Rosamund Pike, Robert Duvall, and Werner Freaking Herzog as a villain. Oh, and it stars Tom Cruise in the lead role as Jack Reacher. It’s that last bit that continues to rile fans of Child’s books as the recurring character is consistently described as a 6’5″ monster of a man whose physical presence plays a role in his every encounter. Some readers just don’t think Cruise is up to the task. But footage from the film has just screened at CinemaCon in Las Vegas, and if the report from Cinema Blend is any indication Cruise may just have a shot at winning over some non-believers.