Marvel has announced that Natalie Portman has signed on to Kenneth Branagh’s Thor film, confirming the months-old rumor broken by Nikki Finke. Despite being only sorta-news, movie bloggers everywhere are happy for another excuse to post hot pictures of her, and Marvel is happy to bump down articles about that traitor Ryan Reynolds headlining a DC super-hero movie.

Not previously known and now official: Portman will be playing Jane Foster, who was  — in the early comics — a mortal nurse who became Thor/Dr. Donald Blake’s first love. The release states that her character will be updated for the new movie, though.

According to the release, the film centers around Thor (Chris Hemsworth) being “cast down to Earth and forced to live among humans as punishment” after reigniting an ancient war. “Once here, Thor learns what it takes to be a true hero when the most dangerous villain of his world (Loki, played by Tom Hiddleston) sends the darkest forces of Asgard to invade Earth.”

Portman will next hit the screen in In America director Jim Sheridan’s Brothers, with Jake Gyllenhaal and Tobey Maguire. She recently wrapped production on Hesher, opposite Joseph Gordon-Levitt, and Don Roos’ Love and Other Impossible Pursuits, both of which she executive produced.

Coming up, she is just about to start filming her role as a warrior princess or something in David Gordon Green’s Your Highness, and she’s still attached to the supernatural ballet-thriller Black Swan for Darren Aronofsky.

The film will shoot early next year and is on track for its May 20, 2011, release date.

Related Post: Natalie Portman joins cast of Your Highness; Kenneth Branagh may have found his Thor

According to the first article, each of them had a favorite, it was difficult to come to a consensus on who should get the part, and of course they’re not revealing which person or entity won when Reynolds went into final negotiations yesterday.

The most interesting part about this story is that not only did all three have to come in to do a second round of screen tests, but that this process started last Monday, when a deal with two of the three actors had expired, which meant they would be free to sign deals with other movies whose production schedules matched up with Lantern’s, and that everyone involved was able to wait about a week before someone blabbed to the media.

Of the three, I think that Timberlake would have been the most awkward choice because while he has proven himself to be a gifted actor, he’s still behind Cooper and Reynolds when it comes to chops. Between the two, I would have had a difficult time choosing, too.

The movie begins shooting in January, 2010, and is set to open in December.

Update (7/13/09): Variety put a new article up late last night saying that, indeed, Ryan Reynolds is now “set” as the star of Green Lantern — meaning the contracts are signed. This shit is official, kids!

Related Posts: Green Lantern gets different director… maybe?; Deadpool gets his own X-Movie; Wolvie gets a sequel (updated)

Written by Ben Best and Danny McBride, Your Highness is about “an arrogant, lazy prince (McBride) who must complete a quest to save his father’s kingdom. Joining him on the quest is his more heroic brother (Franco).” Deschanel will play Belladonna, Franco’s virginal bride, while Portman plays McBride’s love interest, a warrior princess.

Natalie Portman and Zooey Deschanel.

Natalie Portman. And Zooey Deschanel.

I love Natalie Portman and Zooey Deschanel. And they’re in a fantasy movie together… which is a coincidence, because the two of them together is like my ultimate fantasy.

Your Highness begins shooting this month in Ireland.

np + zd = zomg

Related Post: Natalie Portman joins cast of Your Highness; James Franco swears fealty to Your Highness; McBride and Green Get High Again

According to Variety, Mel Gibson has taken the lead role in Jodie Foster’s returning to sitting behind a camera, Beaver, about a “depressed man who finds solace in wearing a beaver hand-puppet.” Foster will also star as Gibson’s wife in the film.

The two previously starred together in 1994’s Maverick, which was a pretty fun romp. Foster has directed two previous films, Little Man Tate (which was wonderful) and Home for the Holidays (which I didn’t see but was met with wildly mixed reviews).

Variety notes that financing for the film (budgeted at a modest $18–19 million) is up in the air, but it’s possible Mel Gibson’s Icon Films might get involved. It’s not like he doesn’t have the money.

Beaver starts shooting in New York in September.

The video is a commercial for Palacio del Hierro, a Mexican department store. I’m guessing the use of these characters was licensed, but you never really know. (via Topless Robot)

(To be fair, Mr. Fiennes was hilariously deadpan in In Bruges, one of my favorites from last year.)

In addition to Fiennes, Gervais and Merchant, Cemetery Junction also stars Emily Watson, Matthew Goode (Watchmen), and Steve Speirs, and it’s slated for 2010 release. The UK has it down for April 7th, apparently, but there’s nothing more specific for the US yet. (via Cinematical)

Related Post: Trailer Watch: The Invention of Lying

U.S. District Court judge Stephen G. Larson found that the licensing fees paid by the studio to the comics company for the rights in order to make Superman Returns were indeed of a fair market value and not indicative of a “sweetheart” deal. As thus, Joanne Siegel and Laura Siegel Larson are only entitled to their share of the $13.6 million that DC earned from the sale of the rights rather than any portion of the $391 million that the studio grossed worldwide for the film.

The companies released a joint statement, quoted in the article:

“DC Comics and Warner Bros. Entertainment are very gratified by the court’s thorough and well-reasoned decision in this matter,” the companies said in a joint statement. “The decision validates what DC and Warner Bros. have maintained from the beginning, which is that when they do business with each other, they always strive for—and achieve—fair market value in their transactions. We are very pleased that the court found there was no merit to plaintiffs’ position that the Superman deals were unfair to DC Comics and, by extension, the plaintiffs.”

However, there’s a second component to the case which will take place on December 1, when Larson will take a stab at figuring out exactly how much in profits the women will get from an earlier ruling which gave them half the copyright to the character, as well as an additional part will actually have an impact on when another Superman movie will be made.

According to Marc Toberoff, the attorney for Siegel and Siegel Larson, by 2013 they and the heirs of Joe Shuster will own the entire copyright to the character, which means that if a movie doesn’t get made or start production before then, Warner Bros. will have to deal with them in order to do it and not their sister company DC Comics. Warner Bros. chairman Alan Horn testified during the trial that the property wasn’t currently under development and that the earliest another picture could possibly be released would be 2012.

There’s more juice and dirt in the article, which I highly encourage you to read. And if any of you are writers or comics creators or anything, I also highly urge you to think twice about selling out in order to get your stuff published under “work for hire” contracts.

I just got a whole lot more excited about writer-director Neill Blomkamp’s District 9; the new trailer (courtesy Yahoo!) reveals a much bigger, more action-packed story than I’d expected, and while I was already looking forward to a more sober, philosophical film based on the earlier trailer, this looks even better.

This new-ish official plot description explains a few things you might not quite get from the new trailer:

Thirty years ago, aliens made first contact with Earth. Humans waited for the hostile attack, or the giant advances in technology. Neither came. Instead, the aliens were refugees, the last survivors of their home world. The creatures were set up in a makeshift home in South Africa’s District 9 as the world’s nations argued over what to do with them.

Now, patience over the alien situation has run out. Control over the aliens has been contracted out to Multi-National United (MNU), a private company uninterested in the aliens’ welfare — they will receive tremendous profits if they can make the aliens’ awesome weaponry work. So far, they have failed; activation of the weaponry requires alien DNA.

The tension between the aliens and the humans comes to a head when an MNU field operative, Wikus van der Merwe, contracts a mysterious virus that begins changing his DNA. Wikus quickly becomes the most hunted man in the world, as well as the most valuable — he is the key to unlocking the secrets of alien technology. Ostracized and friendless, there is only one place left for him to hide: District 9.

District 9 opens on August 14, 2009.

Related Post: Trailer Watch: District 9 teaser trailer (updated)

Randall Wallace (Braveheart, We Were Soldiers) will be doing rewrites to the movie which was originally announced at the beginning of this year, and has already gone through two other scripts, the first from Bill Marsilli (Deja Vu) and the second from Justin Marks (Fast Forward, Street Fighter: The Legend of Chun-Li), whom /Film.com called “a screenwriter who gets the geek niche.”

Nemo will tell the origin story of French science fiction novelist Jules Verne’s Captain Nemo—a character Disney has visited once before in their 1954 live-action adaptation of Verne’s novel 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea—and how he created his revolutionary (for Victorian England, that is) undersea ship, the Nautilus. Though some Nemo’s origins are explored in Verne’s sequel novel The Mysterious Island, it’s currently unknown how much Marsilli, Marks, and now Wallace are going to include.

McG (Charlie’s Angels, Terminator: Salvation) has been attached as the director, and in the Variety article I linked to above, it was said that there was a bidding war over making this his very next project. There are also numerous rumors over who would be playing the Indian-born but originally Polish-created Nemo, ranging from Will Smith to Dwayne Johnson, but no one has been cast in the movie yet—probably because they keep changing the script.

Filming is supposed to start this year; let’s hope Wallace can type quickly.

At the beginning of this year, I linked to a few entries about why all the poker bloggers seem to think that movies about playing poker suck, except for 1998’s Rounders—which starred Matt Damon as a wunderkind whose dream to make it to the World Series of Poker in Las Vegas, Nevada gets sidetracked by a wisecracking Ed Norton and a bad beat at the hands of John Malkovich and is said by many to have been a major contributor to the rise of online poker.

In the comments to that entry, a reader named Gordon (who is not the same person as my dear editor) linked to a recent Matt Damon interview conducted by the folks at PokerListings.com as he was on the red carpet before the third annual “Ante up for Africa” charity poker tournament at the WSOP, where he, Ben Affleck, Mike Tyson, and others bumped elbows with bonafide professional poker players in an attempt to raise money for the victims of the violence in Darfur.

The “money quote” comes almost halfway through the video, where an unseen interviewer asks if there’s going to be a Rounders 2:

Damon: “I told [Brian] Koppleman and [David] Levien, the writers, that they should write it. They actually wrote Ocean’s 13 and we were sitting on the set one day and I said, “You guys wrote the wrong sequel; we should be in Costa Rica doing Rounders 2.

“I think that everybody would probably come back. The actors all had a really good time working together. I know Edward would want to do it. We had a blast working together. John Dahl, the director, I’m sure would like to do it. Maybe someday it’ll happen.”

However, and I am so ashamed for having missed this, not only has that script already been written, Damon and Norton might not have anything to do with it.

Back in June, /Film.com picked up the news that Paramount Pictures had optioned an untitled script by the duo, and that Leonardo diCaprio was attached to star, it would be produced through his Appian Way studio, and the story was all about (you guessed it!) the world of Costa Rican-based online casinos.

I really have no idea how the two could make a movie about Internet casinos compelling because all the action takes place online and it’s only when you get the online players out into “meatspace” do they become interesting. For example (and I hate to keep bringing her up) one of the best European poker players in the entire world is a girl named Annette Obrestad whom no one really knew when she was playing online as Annette15, but when she became the youngest person to ever a win a World Series of Poker live tournament event and the poker news media discovered that she’d been playing since she was 15 (hence, her handle) she became an instant celebrity.

There are tons of great stories surrounding the controversies surrounding online poker and why almost all of the casinos are now based in Costa Rica; the problem in turning it into a movie is that not even the poker media wants to cover that story, as Pokerati.com’s California Jen wrote yesterday when Congressman Barney Frank arrived to hold a press conference about the future of online poker in the U.S.:

But while the general reception Frank received in the Amazon Room was positive, it also gave an indication of what kind of struggles his efforts face. Beyond having to deal with the self-promotional shenanigans of Phil Hellmuth and all he brings to the table in the name of poker (for better or worse), behind me on the rail were some poker players/fans/bigots who made hateful gay jokes during his entire short-but-semi-important speech.

Nearing the 1pm start of the press conference in the Full Tilt Chris Ferguson suite, there were about 5 reporters present. No kidding. By the time Frank began speaking, there were possibly twice that, excluding PPA representatives and Full Tilt Poker bigwigs. Of the 5-8 media outlets represented, ESPN got their headshot early and left, before the speech had hardly started.

Well, I’ll be definitely keeping my eye on this story, but am also not holding my breath that this unnamed project will be the next great poker movie.

According to Variety, the Adam Sandler-penned-and-starring Grown-Ups will be opening on June 25, 2010 moving up from its original March release date and moving the Seth Rogen-penned-and-starring Green Hornet forward to July 9.

Honestly, I can’t blame them for making that choice because as Peter Bart possibly predicted last September and had been born out by some of the types of movies that came out of the Great Depression, it seems as if people love, want, and need their “lovely happy bunny movies” during this economic crisis—as the numbers for The Hangover and The Proposal (over $100 million worldwide, over a budget of $40 million and still in fourth place this past weekend) have proven.

Other films that will be opening around both movies in 2010 are:

June 25: Despicable Me (Universal Pictures), Predators (20th Century Fox)
June 30: Twilight: The Eclipse (Summit Entertainment)
July 2: The Last Airbender (Paramount Pictures)

Recent Posts: Columbia pic gets five comedy stars, Green Hornet gains director Michel Gondry

Yesterday it was reported by the Associated Press that actor Karl Malden died at the age of 97 of natural causes in a statement that was made by his family to Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences.

Best known by people of the Internet generation as that guy who kept telling people not to leave their homes without their American Express cards, Malden started his acting career on the stage in such plays as “A Streetcar Named Desire,” “All My Sons,” and “Key Largo,” and it through director Elia Kazan that he was able to make the transition to Hollywood.

After serving in World War II, Malden appeared in a string of successful classic films such as the film version of A Streetcar Named Desire (1951) for which he won the Academy Award for his supporting role as Mitch, Marlon Brando’s character’s best friend. Malden and Brando had worked on the stage in New York City before, and they would work together again in On the Waterfront (1954) with Maldon playing the priest to Brando’s character, garnering him another Oscar nomination.

In 1972, he gravitated to the small screen where his role as Lt. Mike Stone in “The Streets of San Francisco” for which he was nominated four times for the lead actor Emmy but never received, sharing the screen with a young talent by the name of Michael Douglas.

I’ve always been fond of him as an actor and his range always astonished me, especially his role as Herbie in Gypsy (1962) where he was called upon to act, sing, and hold his own against Rosalind Russell and Natalie Wood. You can check out his other work in this Washington Post slideshow.

Apart from his wife Mona (to whom he was married for over 70 years) Malden is survived by daughters Mila and Cara, his sons-in-law, three granddaughters, and four great grandchildren.

The best part? It’s all true. (Or as true as Hollywood gets, anyway.)

Steven Soderbergh’s The Informant! also stars Scott Bakula and Tony Hale (Buster from Arrested Development). The film opens in the US on October 9, with international releases following in most markets within a month.

You can also watch this trailer in glorious Quicktime over at Apple.

Not long after the producing duo of Sean Furst and Bryan Furst released the trailer to the upcoming Daybreakers (which stars Ethan Hawke and hopefully will forever destroy the notion that vampires sparkle), Variety reported that the two were set to produce the remake of the 1981 classic horror movie An American Werewolf in London through Dimension Films.

More important, however is Variety writer Dave McNary’s tip of the hat to the team at Bloody Disgusting.com for keeping on the story they teased out of original director John Landis during an interview at last year’s HorrorHound convention in Pittsburgh, PA.

No word yet on who’s writing or directing the remake, but judging by how damn awesome Daybreakers looks and feels, this is one remake I’m actually looking forward to seeing on the big screen.

—Topless Robot’s Rob Bricken (and my former managing editor at Anime Insider) tries to explain everything you never needed to know about Transformers 2: Revenge of the Fallen