• Or is it technically Ghostbusters IV? Columbia Pictures has hired writers Lee Eisenberg and Gene Stupnitsky, both of TV’s The Office, to script a new installment of the Ghostbusters series, which was previously thought to be hitting a final note with an upcoming video game (which Dan Aykroyd led us to believe was pretty much “Ghostbusters III”). The Hollywood Reporter claims that while the new sequel may involve the original cast, the main focus will be with a rookie cast of Ghostbusters.
• Paul Bettany, who played a kind of precursor to Charles Darwin in Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World, will actually portray the famous evolution theorist in the biopic Creation (formerly titled Origin), scripted by Master and Commander’s John Collee and to be directed by Jon Amiel (The Core). Bettany’s real wife, Jennifer Connelly, will play Darwin’s wife/first cousin, Emma.
• Albert and Allen Hughes will finally follow-up their 2001 period-set From Hell with the post-apocalypse-set Book of Eli, which will star Denzel Washington as a man “who must fight across America to bring society the knowledge that could be the key to its redemption.”
• Tarantino’s Inglorious Bastards script is pissing off the Germans.
• According to Variety, as long as male audiences aren’t too busy with the new football season or summer leftovers, Nic Cage and his latest crapfest, Bangkok Dangerous, should top the box office this weekend.

• Earning $14.3 million in its third weekend, Tropic Thunder retained its top placement on the box office chart over the holiday, yet it’s total gross still hasn’t reached the movie’s reported $90 million budget. Meanwhile, five new wide releases (Babylon A.D., Traitor, Disaster Movie, College and Hamlet 2, which expanded this week) performed badly enough to place this year’s Labor Day total at 17% below last year’s. In the end, the slow four-day weekend may have contributed to Summer 2008’s inability to top the box office of Summer 2007, despite The Dark Knight’s now more than $500 mill. take.
• The most interesting box office news from the weekend is Mamma Mia!’s 34% increase over its previous weekend take — despite having lost more than 350 screens — due to Universal’s releasing a special sing-a-long version of the musical to 299 locations. I’d say something about the film being on its way to Rocky Horror-like cult hit status, but at $132.9 million and climbing, it’s already earned more than Rocky Horror has in 35 years and should anyway be considered an actual hit.
• As for limited releases, Variety and The Hollywood Reporter failed to mention that Takashi Miike’s Sukiyaki Western Django earned $13,106 on a single screen in NYC this past weekend. Meanwhile, one of my favorite films of the year, Jirí Menzel’s I Served the King of England, earned a terrific per-screen average of $8,488 to gross almost $68,000.
• I’ve always thought Nastassja Kinski was one of the most boring actresses in the world, but at least she would have given Quentin Tarantino’s Inglorious Bastards that usual casting from the ’70s cred. Unfortunately, Diane Kruger, who’s just plain boring, has instead been cast in the part originally offered to Kinski.

• Brad Pitt has officially signed on to play the lead role in Quentin Tarantino’s Inglorious Bastards. Other stars who have deals in the works: Nastassja Kinski, Simon Pegg, David Krumholtz.
• Electronic Arts is producing a video game based on The Godfather II. The game will loosely follow the plot of the movie, but will omit the flashbacks to the life of young Vito Corleone. Robert Duvall is doing voice work, and all the stars of the original film except for Al Pacino have signed off on the use of their likenesses.
• Paramount will release a two-disc Iron Man DVD on September 30. The set will include Robert Downey Jr’s screen test (they made him test? Ouch.), “a seven-part making-of documentary and a six-part feature on the origins of the Marvel superhero.”

• Ostensibly looking to replicate the success of their existing, cinema-inspired period series, AMC is planning to spin a series off of Francis Ford Coppola’s 1974 film, The Conversation. The original is topical, says producer Erik Jendresen. “Watching The Conversation today is fascinating in light of the Patriot Act. But this is not a series that’s blatantly making a statement; it will still be very true to the original vision of the character.”
• Another day, another name for the Inglorious Bastards call sheet. This time it’s B.J. Novak from The Office.
• Meryl Streep will continue her midlife career resurgence as star of glossy chick coms by toplining the latest effort by Nancy Meyers. She’ll play a woman at the center of a love triangle with two men.

Britney Spears to play lesbian killer in Quentin Tarantino film!!!!!!

The exclamation points are mine, but they’re implied in this Telegraph headline, which is quickly making the rounds of the “publish first, conveniently forget to retract later” gossip blogs. The rumor is that Britney has been hand-picked by Quentin to “play dancer Varla in a remake of the 1965 cult film Faster Pussycat! Kill! Kill!”

The reality check: as far as I can tell––Tarantino has never even confirmed a Liz Smith report from way back in January claiming that he’s making a remake of the Russ Meyer schlock classic. And, since that story mentioned that Britney was in the running, even if there is something to it it’s kind of old news. It might be a strategic PR drop (I don’t know by who––does Britney even have a publicist anymore?) to counteract the Page Six item from last week, which suggested (without comment from the Tarantino camp) that porn star Tera Patrick was getting the role. But I have a hard time believing that this is anything other than a publicity game at this point, considering that Tarantino hasn’t even finished casting the epic that he plans to screen in seven months at Cannes.

That said: if it’s between Spears and Patrick, we definitely vote for the former. She needs it more.

UPDATE: Access Hollywood has denials from both Tarantino and Spears. And Media Morgue says Quentin’s agent told them way back in March that the remake was just a rumor.

• Torture pornographer Eli Roth is in talks “a baseball bat-swinging Nazi hunter” in Quentin Tarantino’s The Inglorious Bastards. Tarantino is apparently still talking to Brad Pitt about playing the lead role in the film, but nothing has been finalized.
• Pineapple Express and the sequel to The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants are opening today because their distributors want to “get a jump on a weekend full of Olympics coverage, which shifts into high gear Friday with the Opening Ceremony.” The “high end of expectations” would have David Gordon Green’s stoner comedy beating Batman at the box office. Emphasis on the “high.”
• A theoretical SAG work stoppage be damned, Ang Lee will begin shooting Taking Woodstock this month, his ensemble film about the “aspiring interior designer” who offered up his parents hotel as the concert’s base of operation. Meanwhile, a new 40th anniversary Woodstock DVD is in the works, with at least an hour of concert footage added.
• Prada has commissioned nine short films inspired by Prada, which Prada will then have edited into a feature about Prada, for viewing on the Prada website.

• Will The Dark Knight surpass Titanic to become the highest grossing movie ever?!??!? No, probably not. Meanwhile, expectations are being cut on how much money Tropic Thunder will realistically be able to pull on its R rating.
• Universal has expressed strong interest in taking on co-financing and distributing duties on Quentin Tarantino’s Inglorious Bastards.
• Jack White and Alicia Keys have recorded the theme song to the upcoming James Bond film, Quantum of Solace. It’s the first duet in Bond theme song history!

• Robin Williams and a title like World’s Greatest Dad reek of a possible broad comedy combining Father’s Day, RV and Mrs. Doubtfire. But would you believe it will be a dark comedy in which Williams’ son dies in “an apparent autoerotic accident”? What if I told you Bobcat Goldthwait is the writer-director?

• Danny DeVito, who also had the honor of directing Williams in an audience-limiting black comedy, will make up the difference here by helming the young-adult-geared period piece The True Confessions of Charlotte Doyle. Morgan Freeman, Pierce Brosnan and Atonement’s Saoirse Ronan star.
• Speaking of Father’s Day, once-huge screenwriting duo Lowell Ganz and Babaloo Mandel are the latest to rework Touchstone’s Charlie Kaufman-by-way-of-Zach Helm-wannabe reflexive musical Bob: The Musical.
• Quentin Tarantino’s Inglorious Bastards is on the fast track towards its eventual post-theatrical Showtime run with trade-reported rumors that Brad Pitt and Leonardo DiCaprio could costar. Let me just put it out there that Williams would be a great addition, as well.
• From E3: Sony has finally launched its movie download service for its PlayStation, though it won’t feature any Universal titles (sorry, no Patch Adams), which are exclusive to Xbox 360, which of course also now works with Netflix streams.
• The New York Film Festival will open with Lauren Cantet’s Palme D’or winner, The Class. Which will probably one day be remade with Williams starring.

• In case you aren’t anticipating Tarantino’s Inglorious Bastards tooooo badly, you can now be sure that you can wait and see it eventually on Showtime, with which The Weinstein Co. now has a seven-year deal. I guess this is good news for the cable channel after the Viacom-subsidiary coup back in April, but as I’m reminded daily, Showtime is the “network of the year” as far as series go. So, why should anyone care if they have exclusive rights to just-confirmed Scream 4 and the remake Piranha 3-D, which won’t even be of interest on a 2-D television anyway?
• Hopefully none of you Xbox 360 owners already bought the Roku box for streaming Netflix movies on your television. Yesterday, at the E3 video game conference, Microsoft announced that you can now do pretty much the same thing with your gaming console.
• In other E3 news, there will be an official announcement today about Warner Bros.’ plan to adapt the hit video game Lost Planet, which will be written by X-Men scribe David Haytner.

Why don’t I give a shit about Quentin Tarantino’s Inglorious Bastards? Is it because I sat through (and even partially live-blogged) his masturbatory “lecture on cinema” in Cannes––is it just too soon? Is it because I’ve seen Pulp Fiction so many times that I can no longer actually see anything in it at all? Is it because I walked out of Grindhouse saying. “Well, THAT joke isn’t funny anymore…”?

I don’t know what it is! But I know that some of you probably care, so if you haven’t already, check out Vulture’s preview/review of the script.

…Read more

• The members of AFTRA have ratified a proposed deal with the APMTP over a new contract. This wrecks SAG’s hopes that they’ll be able to use the dissatisfaction of the hundred-thousand-plus actors who belong to both unions as leverage against their own stalled negotiations. Another factor to SAG’s woes: after the WGA strike, nobody wants to be out of work again.
• Variety confirms Nikki Finke’s report that the Weinsteins are looking for a financing partner to help them get Quentin Tarantino’s Inglorious Bastards made in time for premiere at Cannes 2009; the studio has already found a moneybag for Rob Marshall’s Nine in Relativity Media.
• Palisades Media has picked up the just-shuttered Tartan UK’s 400-film video library, which includes films like Super Size Me, In the Mood For Love, and the works of Bergman and Pasolini.

• The Perfect Ratio isolates a heretofore unanalyzed aspect of The Wackness‘ appeal. “[Olivia] Thirby plays the indie-standard ideal female, what I like to call the “Quirky Aggressive”…Advice: Quirky Aggressives are only beloved in indie films. Please do not try to be one in real life…For the first few months your dude will be all like, “OMG, you’re so cool and funny! You’re not like other girls!” because you said something about giving “Nietzche a BlowJ” or some Quirky Aggressive-esque bullshit, but then after about six months the charm wears off…”
• “I like to watch movies in a theater, on a big screen. At worst, I like to watch them on television, on a smaller screen,” Michael Tully disclaims, before reviewing the latest offerings at YouTube’s Screening Room. “Having said all of this, perhaps I’m not the right person to write about [the Screening Room]. Or in a strange twist of logic, maybe this makes me the perfect person for the job!”
• Blah blah blah Inglorious Bastards, blah blah blah believe it when I see it and only care on a much colder day in hell than that.