seth rogen (16 posts)

The Weinstein Company

Seth Rogen is now too skinny to play that chubby funnyguy Seth Rogen in a movie. "I'm sellin' out, guys," a slimmer Seth tells E! News at this week's Zack and Miri Make a Porno press day.

"It's for The Green Hornet," he says of his upcoming flick. "The only reason. There's no other reason. I think it serves the movie."

To play the legendary costumed crimefighter, there's no quickie detox or reality-show competition for Seth. "It's the lamest answer ever," he confesses. "I eat well and I exercise."

Easy, then. No burgers, plus a brutal trainer. "I go there real early in the morning," Seth says. "He tells me what to do, and I go home and go to sleep, and it's like it never even happened."

So how many pounds? You can tell us, man. "I don't weigh myself."

But as soon as Green Hornet wraps, expect the big old Seth we know and love. "I think it will take three hours," he says.

The Green Hornet begins shooting in May.

Dale Robinette/Columbia Pictures

Seth Rogen's kidding around with cancer (and no, we're not kidding).

The Superbad star is going where no funnyman has gone before, signing on for a supporting role in I'm With Cancer, about one man's battle to beat the dread disease.

Hahahahaha...

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Warner Bros. Pictures

Beware, Lord Vader.

The Dark Knight brought its overall domestic gross to $441.5 million today, per Exhibitor Relations estimates, moving the film to third among the all-time box office champs, and leaving it perhaps only a week away from trumping Star Wars for second place.

The Batman movie's Friday-Sunday take of $26 million gave the blockbuster its fourth-straight weekend box office win—a feat not accomplished since Lord of the Rings: Return of the King ruled in 2003-04.

Assuming the studio estimates hold, the weekend gross moved Dark Knight up four spots on the all-time list, as the film bypassed Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest ($423 million), Star Wars: Episode I—The Phantom Menace ($431 million), E.T. ($435 million) and Shrek 2 ($441.2 million).

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Darren Michaels/Columbia Pictures, Stephen Vaughan/DC Comics

The summer box office continued to cook yesterday, with The Dark Knight express well on its way to blow by E.T., and Pineapple Express off to an unexpectedly fast start.

Having passed Spider-Man for seventh on the list of all-time grossers on Tuesday, the Batman movie took in an estimated $5 million Wednesday, Exhibitor Relations said, bringing its overall domestic total to about $410 million.

By the end of the weekend, the box-office tracking firm said, The Dark Knight  "should be up to at least No. 4" on the all-time list, meaning it would have passed E.T., currently in fourth with $435 million, and positioned itself to take down Shrek 2, currently in third with $441 million.

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Eric Charbonneau/WireImage.com

The chemistry between Pineapple Express buds Seth Rogen and James Franco goes way back to their man-crushing days on Freaks and Geeks.

"I read in an interview that when he met me, it was the first time he could think about having sex with a guy," Franco told E! News at the movie's premiere Thursday night.

"And I felt the same, except he was underage. So I had to wait a couple years. There's nothing sexier than someone with a sense of humor."

We'd have to agree with the man there—though a six pack doesn't hurt.

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Jeffrey Mayer/WireImage.com, Gregg DeGuire/WireImage.com/Simon Hollington/ZUMAPress.com

Kevin Smith's upcoming comedy Zack and Miri Make a Porno, with Elizabeth Banks and Seth Rogen, may actually be a porno. No, seriously. The MPAA is trying to slap it with an NC-17 rating, meaning you'd have a tough time seeing it down at the megaplex.

So what's in this thing that makes it so, like, porny? We asked Seth, and here's what he said...

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Reese Witherspoon won an Oscar channeling June Carter Cash. But her next role will be a real stretch.

The 5-foot-2 actress has landed the lead voice role in DreamWorks Animation's next computer-generated cartoon, Monsters vs. Aliens, playing a giant in the spoof of '50s sci-fi flicks, the studio announced Tuesday.

"I got very inspired when the studio showed me storyboards," the actress told USA Today from ShoWest, the annual film exhibitors confab in Las Vegas. "Playing a larger-than-life woman has given me my own opportunity to make tall jokes."

Witherspoon leads an all-star cast in the would-be blockbuster, voicing the role of Susan Murphy, a California girl who gets hit by a meteor on her wedding day and mysteriously grows into the 49-foot freak who becomes known as Ginormica.

Also on board: Knocked Up's Seth Rogen as B.O.B., an indestructible goo akin to the big-screen Blob; Stephen Colbert, who's taking time out from his Tek Jansen animated adventures to play—aptly enough—the president of the United States (looks like Colbert's campaign was a success, after all); Arrested Development's Will Arnett will play the macho half-ape, half-fish Missing Link; House's Hugh Laurie is set for the insect-headed Dr. Cockroach; The Office's Rainn Wilson has signed on to play the evil alien Gallaxhar; 24's Kiefer Sutherland will be General W.R. Monger; and Rogen's Knocked Up costar Paul Rudd plays Susan's fiancé, Derek.

Ginormica is captured by the military and held in a secret government prison along with various other "monsters" deemed a threat to society. That is, until  a mysterious alien robot makes a landing and starts wreaking havoc  (à la The Day the Earth Stool Still). General Monger then unleahses the monsters to fight the aliens and save the planet.

Codirected by Rob Letterman (Shark Tale) and Conrad Vernon (Shrek 2), Monsters vs. Aliens is due out Mar. 27, 2009. It will also be the first film DreamWorks plans to unleash in its Ultimate 3-D format, which it recently developed in-house.

At the ShoWest convention, DreamWorks Animation honcho Jeffrey Katzenberg sounded downright giddy over the eye-popping technology powering the film.

"It is nothing less than the greatest innovation that has happened for all of us in the movie business since the advent of color 70 years ago," he gushed during an address to exhibitors. "Now it's our chance to deliver something that is far superior than anything that can be done in the home."

Katzenberg previewed a clip from Monsters vs. Aliens featuring an attack by the U.S military on a space ship while the president fired a pistol and yelled, "I'm a brave president!" Independence Day-style.

Audiences will still have to sport funky 3-D specs, but Katzenberg claimed that unlike the old-school 3-D, no one will be going cross-eyed from the new process.

More than 10,000 theater screens will be equipped in the next three years with digital 3-D systems, after a company called Acess Integrated Technologies announced a deal Tuesday with 20th Century Fox, Disney, Paramount and Universal. So far, only about 4,600 of the 38,000 screens in North America are digital.

However, the move to 3-D will have one negative impact on moviegoers: higher ticket prices. The new dimensionalization process increased the Monsters vs. Aliens budget by at least $15 million, but Katzenberg noted that audiences will gladly fork over a few more bucks for a "premium experience."

Indeed, filmgoers shelled out more for the live-action 3-D Hannah Montana/Miley Cyrus: Best of Both Worlds Concert Tour, which broke records at the box office, grossing $61 million in limited release.

But Monsters vs. Aliens isn't the only 3-D adventure in the pipeline.

Over the next two years, several studios have such films in the works, including New Line's Journey to the Center of the Earth 3D; James Cameron's highly anticipated sci-fi epic Avatar, for 20th Century Fox; DreamWorks Animation's How to Train Your Dragon (which was pushed to spring 2010 to avoid competing for screens with Avatar); and Disney's Toy Story 3, which will be accompanied by rereleases of the first two Toy Story movies in 3-D.

The tag-team behind Knocked Up has another bun in the oven.

Fresh off the huge critical and box-office opening of their baby-making comedy, Seth Rogen and Judd Apatow have secured a release date for their next collaboration, Pineapple Express.

The stoner comedy starring and cowritten by Rogen and produced by Apatow has been given an Aug. 8, 2008, release date by Sony.

The flick will also reunite them with Freaks and Geeks cohort James Franco. In the movie, Rogen once again plays to type as a dead-end pot-happy slacker, with Franco as his like-minded buddy. The twosome inadvertently witness a drug-related murder and are forced to go on the run from a gang of dirty cops.

"It's like a weed action-comedy but with an oddly emotional friendship story," Rogen explained to Entertainment Weekly. "We tried to retain all of our emotional credibility from Knocked Up and Superbad and slide it into the weed action-comedy genre. It's a very strange, awesome action movie."

Also onboard Pineapple Express is Gary Cole, Rosie Perez and Danny McBride. Indie-film vet David Gordon Green will direct. Rogen cowrote the film with longtime writing partner Evan Goldberg.

The film's primo release date comes after Knocked Up's big weekend debut. Despite facing off against Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End, Knocked Up raked in $30.6 million in second place, easily recouping for Universal, in just three days, the entire cost of making the film. The film, which garnered thumbs-up from nearly every major critic, is expected to remain strong for several weeks. Sony is no doubt hoping for a repeat of fortune, particularly with Rogen's star on the rise.

He has a key supporting part in the upcoming Superbad, another R-rated raunchfest that he Rogen and Goldberg penned.

The buzzed-about film, starring Arrested Development's Michael Cera and Jonah Hill as slacker high school students named Seth and Evan, is due out Aug. 17.

As for Apatow, he recently signed on to produce the upcoming Year One, a comedy with some familiar faces. Harold Ramis, who appears in Knocked Up, will direct and coproduce, while Cera is set to star alongside Jack Black.

While Pineapple Express won't have a Pirates of the Caribbean sequel to battle, it will have some tough competition, opening against Hellboy 2 and the Brendan Fraser flick Journey 3-D.

Meanwhile, Apatow, who directed and wrote Knocked Up, is defending his comedy from charges of stealing the plot from a Canadian journalist.

Rebecca Eckler filed a federal copyright-infringement lawsuit in January claiming Apatow's swiped major elements from her 2005 book, Knocked Up: Confessions of a Hip Mother-to-Be.

The book recounts her own story of being a young reporter who accidentally gets pregnant after a drunken evening. (View the lawsuit.)

Apatow, however, denies plagiarizing Eckler. "The book is about a woman who gets pregnant by the fiance that she loves on the night of her engagement party," he said in a statement. "The film is about a one-night stand between a pot-smoking slacker and an ambitious young woman that leads to a pregnancy and their attempts to get to know each other.

"Anyone who reads the book and sees the movie will instantly know that they are two very different stories about a common experience."

The trial is tentatively slated to begin in Los Angeles in March 2008.