1. Paulo Costanzo (“Road Trip”) will play the lead role in Jason James’ “That Burning Feeling”. “The film has Murphy as a guy who has it all, success, women, charm. One day he loses it and, in his fall, starts going through his book of exes to find out who he really is. Star Trek’s John Cho and former Animal Practice actor Tyler Labine co-star.”
2. David R.Ellis (“Snakes on a Plane”) will direct “Sprawl”, a Blumhouse-produced horror thriller from writers Jordan Goldberg & Alex Paraskevas.
3. Katherine Heigl, Will Arnett, Brendan Fraser, Stephen Lang, Sarah Gadon, and Jeff Dunham will lend their voices to the new animated film “The Nut Job”, which follows “the travails of the mischievous squirrel Surly and his rat pal Buddy as they plan a nut store heist that gets out of hand.”
4. Jane Goldman (“Kick-Ass”) is set to write “Pinocchio” for director Tim Burton and star Robert Downey Jr. The Warner Bros take will star Downey as Gepetto.
5. FX has renewed “American Horror Story” for a third season. Jessica Lange will return.
6. Mykelti Williamson and Frances Fisher will recur on the next season of the Kiefer Sutherland series “Touch”.
7. “Friday Night Lights” star Jesse Plemons is set to join Benjamin Walker in HBO pilot “The Missionary”. It tells of “Roy (Walker), a young American missionary who gets caught up in Cold War intrigue while helping a young woman escape East Berlin. Plemons, repped by TalentWorks and attorney David Matlof, will play Sherwood Elbridge, a young coca-cola executive who helps smuggle defectors out of the Eastern Bloc. Baltasar Kormakur is directing.”
8. Casey Affleck and Relativity are developing a film based on the life and career of baseballer Josh Hamilton. Affleck writes and directs.
9. CBS films has nabbed the distribution rights to “The Last Exorcism II”.
10. The recently axed Melissa George series “Hunted” may continue in some other form.
