Welcome to the déjà vu edition, with the latest round of Hollywood wheeling and dealing taking a turn on the retreadmill, including Leonardo DiCaprio looking to enter The Twilight Zone, a revived Robocop and the latest stoner hijinks of Harold and Kumar.
DiCaprio is teaming up with Warner Bros. to find the right pitch for a new movie based on Rod Serling's classic sci-fi TV series.
Unlike 1983's Twilight Zone: The Movie, which remade four classic stories in episodic form for the big screen, DiCaprio's version would likely be a single story based on an old Twilight Zone segment, per the Hollywood Reporter.
Keeping up the rerun theme, MGM has hired director Darren Aronofsky to pull a Christopher Nolan and reboot the dormant Robocop franchise.
Aronofsky is teaming with writer David Self (Road to Perdition) to come up with a new story about the cyborg police officer set for 2010. The original 1987 feature, directed by Paul Verhoeven, spawned two sequels as well as a short-lived TV series and video games.
More on the sequel front: Variety reports that a third Harold and Kumar feature is in the works following the box-office success of Harold & Kumar Escape From Guantanamo Bay.
Stars John Cho and Kal Penn are reprising their roles as the mishap-prone pot-obsessed dudes, but no word yet whether Neil Patrick Harris will be back to torment them.
Of course, Hollywood does have some original ideas in the works. Here's a sampling of today's top new projects and castings:
- X-Men and Superman Returns director Bryan Singer is ready to develop another comic-book-based feature, Freedom Formula. The plot is described as a futuristic Top Gun, with a genetically enhanced racer who discovers that his bloodline has the power to change society.
- Erstwhile Napoleon Dynamite star Jon Heder toplines the sci-fi zombie comedy thriller Woke Up Dead, to be released as 50 three-minute webisodes. Heder plays a college student who wakes up under water in a bathtub one morning and realizes he's dead.
- Harvey Keitel has agreed to headline his first regular TV series gig, joining the cast of ABC's upcoming sci-fi police drama Life on Mars as Detective Gene Hunt, the head of the homicide division who'll do whatever it takes to get the bad guy. Life, which starts shooting in New York next month, stars Jason O'Mara as the time- traveling lead character who finds himself transported back to 1973 after being hit by a car. Michael Imperioli and Jonathan Murphy costar.
- Elizabeth Berkley wants her MTV. The former Showgirl is teaming up with the cable net to develop an unscripted series based on Ask-Elizabeth, her self-esteem, interactive workshops designed to help empower adolescent girls. The pilot is slated to shoot in the fall.
- VH1 has tapped Slither writer-director James Gunn, Saw star Shawnee Smith and acting coach John Homa to serve as judges on its new reality competition series Scream Queens. The show pits 10 unknown actresses against one another to win a major role in a Lionsgate horror flick. It premieres in the fall.
- Funnyman Kevin Hart is set to emcee BET's newly retooled version of its standup series Comic View now, titled Comic View: One Mic Stand. The comedian is also starring in a pilot for a reality comedy called I Ain't Scared and has been added to the cast of the upcoming Comedy Central program Krod Mandoon and the Flaming Sword of Fire.