Casting News Round-Up
March 5, 2008

-Tony Goldwyn and Monica Potter have signed on to star in the Rogue Pictures remake of the Wes Craven classic, The Last House on the Left, according to today's Variety. Dennis Iliadis will direct the remake of the influential horror classic about escaped convicts who take two teenage girls hostage and then end up taking refuge in the home of one of the girl's dads after they left his daughter for dead. Mark Haslett, Carl Ellsworth, and Adam Alleca wrote the remake and Wes Craven is producing with Marianne Maddalena and Sean Cunningham. Wes Craven also produced the remake of The Hills Have Eyes, which was a big hit two years ago. Shooting will begin on The Last House on the Left next month in South Africa, of all places. Both Potter and Goldwyn are not that common to the big screen with the often-director Goldwyn not appearing on-screen since The Last Samurai and Potter being absent since the first Saw movie.

-Meagan Good, Jane Alexander, Idris Elba, Carla Gugino, and Rhys Coiro have joined the cast of David Goyer's Unborn, according to today's The Hollywood Reporter. The quintet joins the already cast Gary Oldman and Odette Yustman in the Rogue Pictures supernatural thriller. Michael Bay, Andrew Form, and Brad Fuller - the team behind the remakes of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and The Amityville Horror - will produce the flick called Unborn. The story by David Goyer is that of a girl (Yustman) who is tormented by the soul of a boy who died in the Holocaust. Meagan Good will play the best friend of the girl and Carla Gugino will play her mother. Jane Alexander is a Holocaust survivor, Idris Elba is a priest, and Rhys Coiro will be the college professor of Yustman's character. Finally, Cam Gigandet (Never Back Down) will play the poor girl's boyfriend.

-Joan Cusack and John Goodman have joined the cast of Confessions of a Shopaholic for Touchstone Pictures, a film that was already set to star the lovely Isla Fisher in the lead role. The film will be based on the bestselling novel by Sophie Kinsella and tells the story of a woman who deals with her shopping addiction and the mounting credit card debt, while she deals with the New York magazine world. Cusack and Goodman will play Fisher's parents. Hugh Dancy and Krysten Ritter have already been cast in the film that will be directed by P.J. Hogan and produced by Jerry Bruckheimer.

-300's Gerard Butler announced this week that he will play the lead in Law Abiding Citizen, the first production by Evil Twins, a shingle formed by the new star and his longtime manager, Alan Siegel. The project is a psychological thriller that will star Butler as a successful assistant D.A. who becomes the center of a vigilante plot hatched by a traumatized victim of the legal system, according to Variety. Law Abiding Citizen was written by Kurt Wimmer and will begin this summer. Variety reports that Butler and Siegel have been working together for eleven years and that they have several projects in pre-production of Evil Twins, including Hanging Tale and Teacher Man. Siegel said, "We're thrilled at the opportunity that Gerry's career has given us to make our own films."