In today’s Callbacks — your daily roundup of casting news from Deal Central — Jennifer Aniston and Paul Rudd join a commune, Brad Pitt and Darren Aronofsky track a killer tiger and DreamWorks wants Tim Burton to play with monsters.
• Universal Pictures has acquired "Wanderlust," a comic vehicle from that will star Jennifer Aniston and Paul Rudd as a New York couple who try to escape the trappings of their modern lives by joining a free-wheeling commune, reports Deadline.
Rudd co-wrote the script with his "Role Models" co-writers David Wain and Ken Marino. The trio will also produce the comedy with Judd Apatow through his production company Apatow Productions.
And in case there’s any confusion about who will be calling the shots behind the camera, Wain’s representation at WME told TheWrap that he is attached to direct.
Earlier today, Aniston was reported to be in negotiations to play one of the titular characters in the New Line comedy "Horrible Bosses," which Rudd has also been unofficially linked to.
• "Amores perros" writer Guillermo Arriaga will adapt "The Tiger," a drama based on an upcoming nonfiction book by John Vaillant that Darren Aronofsky has been developing under the radar since last year as a potential acting vehicle for Arriaga’s "Babel" star Brad Pitt, according to the Hollywood Reporter.
The story follows a conservationist game warden who must protect a small Siberian town from a killer tiger that has begun attacking its inhabitants who are encroaching on the tiger’s habitat. With Aronofsky involved, I’m sure it will turn out better than the killer lion movies "The Ghost and the Darkness" and "Prey."
The project will be a co-production between Focus Features and Random House’s film division. Aronofsky and Pitt will produce through their respective companies Protozoa Pictures and Plan B, whose Dede Gardner and Jeremy Kleiner will also produce with Protozoa’s Mark Heyman and Ari Handel.
Interestingly enough, Pitt was originally supposed to star in two Aronofsky projects, "The Fountain" and "The Fighter," the latter of which is now a David O. Russell film.
Aronofsky has a full plate of projects at the moment, so he hasn’t committed to direct "The Tiger," but it’s possible that Arriaga could step behind the camera, having made his feature directorial debut with "The Burning Plain" last year.
"The Tiger" is the first script Arriaga has written based on someone else’s material. He previously wrote the adaptation of his own novel "The Night Buffalo."
Knopf will publish Vaillant’s "The Tiger: A True Story of Vengeance and Survival" in August.
• DreamWorks has acquired film rights to Matt Wilson‘s kaiju-themed collectible miniatures game "Monsterpocalypse" and is reaching out to Tim Burton to oversee the creative development of the property, reports Deadline.
Talks with Cannes jury head Burton are in the very early stages and only Wilson is attached as a co-producer at this time.
The board game involves battles against a variety of enemy monsters that take place in a building-filled metropolis.
DreamWorks is also developing a film based on Daniel H. Wilson‘s robot attack novel "Robopocalypse," which "Cloverfield" writer Drew Goddard is adapting as a possible directing vehicle for Steven Spielberg. It sounds like a cross between "Casshern" and "Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow," which would be pretty freakin’ cool.
