All Aboard (Mostly) for "Ocean's Thirteen"

Mon., Mar. 27, 2006 7:00 PM PST by Natalie Finn

With George Clooney, Brad Pitt and Matt Damon on board, how can Thirteen not be lucky?

Warner Bros. announced Monday that Clooney, Pitt, Damon and most of the usual suspects from the first two Ocean pics will return for next year's threequel, Ocean's Thirteen. Steven Soderbergh will be on hand to direct for the third time as well.

Neither Julia Roberts, as Danny Ocean's loyal wife Tess, nor Catherine Zeta-Jones, who upped the female presence by a whole extra chromosome in 2004's Ocean's Twelve, will be in this installment.

"It was a script issue," producer Jerry Weintraub told the Associated Press. "We didn't have a place to really use talent like theirs--two big stars like that. Neither Soderbergh nor I would prevail on them to come back and do nothing just to do it."

However, the sultry Ellen Barkin will keep the estrogen quotient in check this time around and, as Weintraub told Variety, she'll be heating up the screen with Damon's character, Linus.

While Ocean's Twelve had the cast jetting off for a Roman holiday to plan the ultimate--albeit really confusing--European heist, Thirteen will return the masters of suave thievery to the scene of the original crime: Las Vegas.

Ocean's Eleven was filmed onsite at the Bellagio Hotel, but to avoid the hassle of shooting around real gambling action, the Ocean's Twelve crew will build a fully operational casino on the Warner Bros. lot in Burbank, California.

The tidal wave of charismatic characters flooding Ocean's again also includes Don Cheadle, Bernie Mac, Andy Garcia, Casey Affleck, Scott Caan, Eddie Jemison, Shaobo Qin, Carl Reiner and Elliott Gould. Warners says another new high-profile cast member will be announced shortly.

Getting this cast in the same room, let alone the same movie, sounds about as easy as stealing $150 million from an impenetrable vault. And, in fact, Warner Bros., which is eyeing a summer 2007 release, had to hustle to make sure Soderbergh, Clooney and, oh, everybody else's schedule could accommodate a July start date for filming.

Ocean's Thirteen has been the studio's first priority lately, according to Variety, and while the end result will most likely be as slick and polished as a thousand-dollar chip, the filmmaking process will have been a labor of love.

"The odds were long on this happening, and it would not have been possible were it not for those actors and director moving other projects out of the way," Weintraub told Variety. "The five of us [Weintraub, Clooney, Pitt, Damon and Soderbergh] are all great friends, and we decided we were going to kill ourselves to get this done."

Of course, it doesn't hurt that the original film grossed more than $450 million worldwide ($183 million of that domestically) and the sequel, $362 million ($125 million domestically), per BoxOfficeMojo.com.

Clooney, fresh off his Oscar win for Syriana, just finished shooting the Soderbergh-directed period film The Good German costarring Cate Blanchett. Soderbergh has also committed to direct an upcoming Che Guevara biopic starring Benicio Del Toro. Meanwhile, Damon is prepping for another installment of his own action franchise, The Bourne Ultimatum.