– Ian McKellen spoke to Empire while at the San Sebastian Film Festival, and the inevitable questions of “The Hobbit” and “X-Men” came up. On Guillermo Del Toro’s Tolkien picture, McKellen said “The scripts for the two films will be delivered very soon…and they’ll be going when they’ve always said they would be, which is next spring – March or Aprill. Guillermo Del Toro even told me at one point, ‘We’re going to film for 383 days.’ ” Meanwhile, McKellen seems to be out of the loop on the unnecessary, and frankly unlikely to ever be filmed, “X-Men Origins: Magneto” project: “There’s meant to be a Magneto script floating around, but I’ve not read it, so I suspect it wouldn’t involve me. I think it would be about the younger Magneto, and the most I could hope for would be to top and tail that. They can’t have someone whose face is as lined as mine any longer!” There’s more over at Empire’s site.
– Mark Palansky, director of the Christina Ricci pig-face movie “Penelope,” has signed to direct the action-comedy “Iron Jack.” for Sony. The movie, about a 1930s novelist and adventurer, is, based on the script draft we read, closer to “Anchorman” than to Indiana Jones (we found it a little one-joke, actually), and had Sacha Baron Cohen attached to star at one point or another, although it’s unclear whether he’s still involved.
– Bloody Disgusting had a writer at the ‘Spooky Empire’ convention in Florida over the weekend, where John Landis announced that retiring “Doctor Who” star David Tennant will pair with Simon Pegg in the upcoming horror comedy “Burke and Hare.” The story is based on a famous pair of 19th century serial killers in Edinburgh, who murdered their victims in order to sell their bodies to an anatomist, and is expected to shoot imminently. All the geek love aside, Tennant, whose film credits include “Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire” and the upcoming “Glorious 39,” is a tremendous actor — his performance on stage in “The Pillowman” is legendary, as was his RSC “Hamlet” last year, and we’re willing to put money on him being a big star in the next few years, now his TV commitments are done. It’s a very promising pairing, and marks a return to the genre where Landis produced his best work, but unfortunately the script is by monumental hacks Piers Ashworth and Nick Moorcroft, who were behind “St.Trinian’s” and its upcoming sequel. At one stage, we heard rumors that Bill Nighy, Michael Fassbender, Eva Green and Colin Firth were also involved in the cast, but this was some time ago.
– “True Blood” stars, and real life couple Anna Paquin and Stephen Moyer, have quietly re-teamed on a horror-thriller named “Open House,” directed by Anna’s brother Andrew Paquin. The film tells of a rich couple trying to sell their home, who discover that one visitor to their open house never left. Also in the cast are Tricia Helfer (“Battlestar Galactica”), Rachel Blanchard (“Where the Truth Lies”) and Brian Geraghty (“The Hurt Locker”). It seems to be in post-production, according to IMDB, so we can expect to see it making the festival rounds next year.
– Scott Stewart, the co-founder of visual effects company The Orphanage, and Gus Krieger (“The Killing Room”), have sold their pitch “Psy-Ops” to Bold Films, who are also behind Stewart’s terrible-looking directorial debut, the angels-with-guns picture “Legion.” The movie, to be directed by his partner in The Orphanage, Stuart Maschwitz, is about a covert team of ‘psychological operatives’, who discover something terrible in the Amazon rainforest. The Hollywood Reporter says that the team are hoping to “combine the elements of such 1980s action flicks as “Predator” and “Aliens” with the psychological tone and visual realism of such 21st century movies as “Black Hawk Down” and the “Bourne” series. When someone thinks of racist arcade shoot-em-up “Black Hawk Down” as having a “psychological tone,” you know to avoid their movie like the plague…