Casting Roundup: Jonah Hill, Jason Segel, Anjelica Huston & Freida Pinto
20th Century Fox has brought on director David Gordon Green (Pineapple Express, Snow Angels) to helm the comedy The Sitter, which was scripted by Brian Gatewood and Alessandro Tanaka and caused a bidding war between Paramount and Fox last year.
The film is being described as a cross between Superbad and Adventures in Babysitting. So of course they bring in Superbad star Jonah Hill (Knocked Up, Forgetting Sarah Marshall) to star as young man forced to babysit three wild kids. Michael De Luca will produce.
Green is on post-production with Universal's Your Highness, starring Zooey Deschanel, Natalie Portman, Danny McBride and James Franco. Hill will next be heard in How to Train Your Dragon and seen in the Forgetting Sarah Marshall spin-off film Get Him to the Greek.
Hill and Green are one of the few combinations in the Judd Apatow stable that had yet to be paired up, though this is not an Apatow production.
Speaking of Forgetting Sarah Marshall, and Apatow stable combinations...
... Jason Segel (How I Met Your Mother, I Love You Man) and John Michael Higgins (Yes Man, A Mighty Wind) are in talks to join Cameron Diaz and Lucy Punch (Hot Fuzz) in the Columbia Pictures comedy Bad Teacher.
Jake Kasdan (Walk Hard, Orange County) is set to direct from a script by Lee Eisenberg and Gene Stupnitsky, who write for The Office, and scripted Year One, and the forthcoming Ghostbusters III.
As we reported in December, Bad Teacher stars Diaz as a foul-mouthed, gold-digging seventh-grade teacher who, after being dumped by her current boyfriend, sets her sights on a colleague (Punch) who is dating the school's model teacher.
The role of the model teacher has yet to be cast, but if they sign on Segel would play a gym teacher and Higgins would play the principal, named Wally Snur.
Jimmy Miller is producing the feature, and lensing begins next month in Los Angeles.
Kasdan and Segel worked together on the Apatow-produced shows like Freaks and Geeks, and Undeclared.
Speaking of Undeclared...
...The Seth Rogen-produced comedy, formerly titled I'm With Cancer, just snagged a couple of acting legends.
Anjelica Huston and Philip Baker Hall will join the cast which includes Rogen, James McAvoy, Anna Kendrick (Up In the Air) and Bryce Dallas Howard (The Village, Spider-man 3).
Jonathan Levine will direct from a script by Will Reiser.
McAvoy stars as a man who learns he has cancer and successfully battles the disease over several years. The character is based on the real experiences of screenwriter Reiser, who won his own fight with cancer in his mid-20s.
Rogen and producing partner Evan Goldberg will produce along with former Daily Show exec producer Ben Karlin.
Meanwhile...
...Coming off the heels of Percy Jackson and Clash of the Titans, Relativity Media is getting in on the Greek mythology game with War of the Gods, which follows a young warrior Theseus who leads his men into battle with the immortal Greek gods to defeat evil and the powerful elder gods of the Titans in order to save mankind.
Henry Cavill (The Tudors) is plying Theseus, and Freida Pinto (Slumdog Millionaire) has been cast as Phaedra, an oracle priestess who must join Theseus on his quest to prevent the cataclysmic war from erupting.
Tarsem Singh (The Fall, The Cell) will direct War of the Gods, which was formerly titled Dawn of War. The original screenplay was written by Charley and Vlas Parlapanides, while the most recent draft of the script was penned by Jason Keller.
Gianni Nunnari, Mark Canton, and Relativity topper Ryan Kavanaugh will produce. Nunnari and Canton partnered were also behind Zack Snyder's adaptation of Frank Miller's sword-and-sandal epic 300.
Production on War of the Gods is set to start in April with Universal handling the release.