The Fast and the Furious franchise has already ponied up for a fourth installment, so it should come as no surprise — in totally old news, industry-wise — that Universal has struck deals with Matt Damon and director Paul Greengrass on a fourth Jason Bourne picture. Last summer’s The Bourne Ultimatum did so well — $227 million domestically, and another $215 million abroad — that it was pretty much a no-brainer, even though the narrative arc of the current trilogy is pretty well settled.

The Bourne series is that rarest of commodities — a genre series with downhill, increasing commercial momentum and upmarket critical appeal. The first flick did $213 million theatrically worldwide in 2002, and played as particularly fresh and real the first summer after the September 11 attacks; two years later, with Greengrass subbing in for the crazy… err, idiosyncratic originating director, Doug Liman, the second film did just under $290 million. Each film sold butt-loads (that’s a measurable unit of sale in Hollywood, for the record) of DVDs too. Add in the fact that distributor Universal is a total whore for anything with a faint whiff of franchise appeal (see the Mummy flicks, the execrable Evan Almighty, and this summer’s The Incredible Hulk reboot, the latter coming less than five years after Ang Lee’s version), and you have all the reasons in the world (or at least in Hollywood) one needs to back a couple trucks full of money up to the houses of the guys who’ve actually made Universal some consistent coin the last half dozen years. No word yet on the release date for the fourth Bourne flick (summer 2009, I assume), but here’s hoping they, in the words of Bono, “go away and dream it all up again.”

Just as Lars and the Real Girl gathers a bit of heat (all things being relative) from its national expansion comes word that star-to-be Ryan Gosling has dropped out of Peter Jackson’s The Lovely Bones, per Variety, one day before shooting was to commence. The film, of course, is based on Alice Sebold’s award-winning novel about a grieving
couple (Rachel Weisz is the other half of the equation) whose world is
shattered after their daughter is murdered. Subsequently, the girl
watches over both her family and her killer from heaven. Mark Wahlberg will replace Gosling.

The age-old adage “creative differences” is naturally being deployed, but in this instance it’s something that I can actually fathom, even if the timing is suspect and problematic, from a damage standpoint. Genial/sensitive exteriors aside, Jackson and Gosling are both strong-willed, stick-to-their-guns creative types, and the 26-year-old Gosling especially has been resistant to the star-making Hollywood apparatus — think of him as an early-era Johnny Depp in this regard, minus the rock band, drug dabbling and Winona Ryder. After gaining 20 pounds and a beard for the role — all in an effort to age himself — one has to guess this was the major sticking point of a few other character bits that Gosling and Jackson just couldn’t see eye to eye on. I can’t imagine it was extremely protracted and marked by screaming matches or anything quite as delicious.

For all his prodigious talent, Gosling has always struck me as having an inherent air of melancholy. He was notably miserable on Murder by Numbers, and had to be basically talked into doing his two other most overtly commercial films, The Notebook and Fracture. Hollywood can’t afford to give up on this guy, but at the same time Gosling just gave reason to give them pause when it comes to casting him in high-profile productions.

I’m somewhat late to this party, but Variety (in addition to other outlets) is reporting that Brad Pitt and Edward Norton have agreed to re-team for State of Play, a political drama penned by Matthew Michael Carnahan and Tony Gilroy, and set to be helmed by The Last King of Scotland director Kevin Macdonald.

In the film — based on the six-hour British miniseries of the same name — Norton will play a congressman whose speedy rise is
threatened by an investigation into the death of his mistress. Pitt
plays a politico-turned-journalist whose relationship with the lawmaker is
compromised when he oversees his newspaper’s investigation into the
murder, and subsequently develops a relationship with the pol’s estranged wife.

Universal is fast-tracking the project in anticipation of next year’s strike, which means a quick turnaround for Norton, who will jump into State of Play right after he wraps The Incredible Hulk. This is good news all around — for Macdonald, certainly, who scores a worthy narrative follow-up to The Last King of Scotland — but also Pitt and Norton, who just really seem to have an excellent rapport with one another. Yes, Fight Club was iconic and ahead of its time, and the glow of that collaboration is part of the allure. But there’s just something about their individual off-screen personas that really jibes and rubs me the right way — maybe it’s the old refrain from the Pet Shop Boys’ “Opportunities” — and I have a feeling this cleverly inverted casting will be great fun to watch.

I’d meant to devote some attention to this earlier, but it somehow slipped through the cracks, a la Congressional oversight circa 2003-04: according to The Hollywood Reporter, Naomi Watts has inked to The International, an espionage thriller penned by debut scribe Eric Singer. The plot centers on an obsessive Interpol agent who spearheads an investigation into one of the world’s most high-profile and powerful banking institutions in an attempt to expose them for corruption and worldwide arms brokering; Watts will play a Manhattan assistant district attorney who partners with the agent to take down the bank.

This sounds a lot better than the starchy, prestige-pic righteousness of Watts’ We Are All the Same; it sounds like a sort of high-grade genre companion piece to The Interpreter, starring Watts’ good friend Nicole Kidman. What makes it really sing, however, is the fact that Tom Tykwer (Run Lola Run) is directing for Columbia Pictures, and that Clive Owen will be playing said Interpol agent. That’s a damn good on-paper combination, right there. Tykwer has a touch with visual panache that’s almost peerless, but that’s largely forgotten because it’s not his only trick. After the still-birth of Perfume — an interesting movie that I mostly enjoyed, but that was certainly given a quarter-assed release from Paramount — it’ll be good to see Tykwer get back to something with the potential for a little pop.

With the success of The 40-Year-Old Virgin and now Knocked Up, the Judd Apatow imprimatur is safely established, and now the further comedic branding is really began to pop and sizzle, with the writer-director putting his stamp of namesake approval on projects as a producer. First it was Seth Rogen who rode this Apatow-inspired wave from costar to leading man, and now Jonah Hill is charting the same trajectory, with this August’s Superbad and next year’s Forgetting Sarah Marshall among the titles on his busy schedule.

Now, per MTV’s Movie Blog site, Hill is having a fit of Pure Imagination, headlining the second of two scripts he’s also written. This one — still shopping for a director, but described as marrying the sort of improvisational guy’s guy comedy of Knocked Up with the flight-of-fancy of Spike Jonze and Michel Gondry — will star Hill as a traumatized twentysomething oaf whose only pal is of his own creation. When he strikes up a relationship with a girl, but starts to in turn wonder if she’s real, he has only this imaginary friend to fall back on for advice. Presumably the friend won’t be named Tyler Durden… but it’d be a lot cooler if he was. Filming looks to start in early 2008, for a possible release the same year.

It’s been a while since we’ve had a crop of screen comedians with such an active hand in writing (rather than just “developing”) their own material. It would be interesting if Rogen, Hill and fellow Apatow disciple Jason Segel could all hone their own popular voices and score big, but the long odds are against it.

In a less puzzling pairing of director and material than the below, Michael Apted — whose innovative Up series has charted the fate of fantastical adolescent imagination on the shoals of adulthood — has been inked to helm the third Chronicles of Narnia film, according to Screen International. The awfully titled The Voyage of the Dawn Treader will start shooting in 2008, to be released on May 1, 2009. Apted is at his core a dramatic filmmaker, a humanistic explorer of interstitial greys, but he also knows a thing or three about huge franchises, having helmed The World Is Not Enough. He should be a good caretaker of the series, as well as a guy who can put a bit of a spin on things. Mark Johnson and Andrew Adamson, who directed the first two installments, will serve as producers for Walden Media/Walt Disney Productions project.

Fresh off reaching back into the cinematic past for purposes of affectionate homage in Grindhouse, director Robert Rodriguez will helm producer Dino De Laurentiis’ remake of Barbarella for Universal, Variety is reporting, with Casino Royale
partners Neal Purvis and Robert Wade handling scripting duties. “I love
this iconic character and all that she represents,” says Rodriguez,
“and I’m truly
excited by the challenge of inviting a new audience into her universe.”

The other quote used in the Variety piece is boilerplate De Laurentiis — he’s been wandering about saying “the future is female” since at least the Hannibal Rising press day — but also indicative of the fact that this version will make its own way in the world, and not feel compelled to conform to past source material, in either the form of the (in)famous 1968 Jane Fonda film or the French comic book.

In speaking with De Laurentiis about casting for movie — which I did earlier this year — it’s clear that he has a jones for Angelina Jolie, but if she can’t be had (and frankly, why would she?), don’t be surprised to see them turn to an up-and-comer with presumed pan-ethnic appeal, someone like Eva Mendes. All in all, though, this movie doesn’t feel like it has the firmest foundation, and not merely because of the disappointing box office grosses of Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino’s Grindhouse. As Aeon Flux and the second Tomb Raider film demonstrated, there’s a certain ceiling on anonymous female mercenary/action pics. The va-voom factor still doesn’t compensate for the fact that some diehard genre fans won’t turn out for these types of movies without a guy in the lead.

Movie geeks of a certain upper-crust persuasion will soon be creaming themselves, given that Variety is reporting Robert De Niro and Al Pacino will team onscreen
for just the second time in Righteous Kill, a planned $60 million indie
production put together by Nu Image’s Millennium Films and Emmett/Furla
Films, with worldwide rights being shopped this week at the Cannes Film Festival. Jon
Avnet, fresh off directing Pacino in 88 Minutes, will helm the picture, from Inside Man scribe Russell Gewirtz’s
script about two cops chasing a serial killer. Shooting will begin the first week of August in Connecticut, with some autumnal filming in New York City to follow.

De Niro and Pacino each appeared in The Godfather II, but shared no scenes together. Michael Mann’s Heat, of course, scored big points by cleverly playing up its cat-and-mouse diner scene between the pair of legendary actors (and Kate Mantilini’s upscale truck-stop restaurant even got a boost from hosting it), but this will be much more of a partnership, so it seems. Producer Randall Emmett said the idea for the film actually originated from the two actors’ desire to work together more directly.

That’s great for screen aficionados, really, but the last part worries me. At two hours and 50-plus minutes, Heat managed only $65 million or so domestically, earning most of its laurels overseas, where it pulled in $120 million. Pacino and De Niro remain nearly unparalleled in respect, but their commercial track record isn’t exactly consistent (Godsend, anyone?), even in fare that tips toward the commercial side of the track. Contrived talent-melding projects rarely come across as less than rigged, and I’d really like for this movie not to eventually end up in the bargain bin alongside The Bone Collector. Fingers crossed, I guess…