Rueben's Ramblings

Hey All,

Here are the entertainment news items for this past week:

DEVELOPMENT NEWS

FOX is developing a one-hour drama called The Miracle Department about a brilliant, but disgraced, former FBI agent who joins forces with a quirky task force to hunt for genuine miracles. (Variety)

Warner Bros Television is in early development on a TV series adaptation of the box office film 300. Exact plot details are still being worked out, but it said that the show would serve as a prequel to the 2006 film, which starred Gerard Butler, Lena Heady, Michael Fassbender and Davie Wenham. (Variety)

SERIES ORDER

Amazon Prime has ordered a series based on the Young Sherlock Holmes novels by author Andy Lane with Hero Fiennes Tiffin (the After movie franchise and The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare) in the lead role. The 8-episode series has attached Guy Ritchie as the director. (Variety)

TV CASTING NEWS

Adria Arjona (Hit Man) and Charlie Hunnam (Sons of Anarchy) have joined the cast of the upcoming Amazon Prime series Criminal, which is based on the graphic novels by Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips. The series is described as an interlocking universe of crime stories with Arjona set to play Greta, a sharp-tongued top-level car thief and driver and the widowed mother of Angie. Ever since her husband died in a bank job gone bad, Greta has been battling with herself about how to escape the only life she’s ever known – and the only place she’s ever thrived. The problem is, she’s good at this. She’s looking for a big score, a lump of money she can use like a gun to shoot her and Angie out of this life and into another one. Meanwhile Hunnam will play Leo, a brilliant master thief who sees all the angles and specializes in plans with no guns and no violence. Like a chess player, he thinks three moves ahead. Other crooks think he’s a coward, especially compared to his father Tommy, who went to jail for murdering the most feared man in the city, Teeg Lawless. (Variety)

Rome Flynn (How To Get Away With Murder and With Love) will recur in the MGM+ series Godfather of Harlm, playing real-life gangster Frank Lucas, a country boy from North Carolina who ventured to Harlem and, after initial friction with gangster Bumpy Johnson (series lead Forest Whitaker), eventually rose to become Bumpy’s fierce defender and right-hand man. (Deadline)

Jack Reynor (Flora and Son) has joined the cast of the Amazon Prime spy drama Citadel, but exact character and plot details for the second season are being kept under wraps. Reynor will appear alongside returning series leads Richard Madden, Priyanka-Chopra Jonas and Stanley Tucci. (Variety)

Camila Morrone (Daisy Jones & the Six) will play a major role in the 2nd season of The Night Manager that will find Tom Hiddleston back in the lead role. No specific details are available on who she will play or what season two will be about. (Deadline)

Actress Nazanin Boniadi will not be returning as Bronwyn in the second season of the Amazon Prime series The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power. It is said Boniadi has stepped away from acting – as of September 2022 – to focus on activism. (The Hollywood Reporter)

BOX OFFICE NEWS

Theo James (Sanditon and The Gentleman) will star alongside Aaron Taylor-Johnson (The Fall Guy) will star in the heist thriller Fuze, which opens on the discovery of an unexploded World War II bomb in a London construction site sparking a mass evacuation; the perfect cover for a heist. (Variety)

Jeremy Renner, Kerry Washington, Glenn Close and Andrew Scott have joined the ever-growing cast of the next Knives Out feature film that already includes Daniel Craig, Josh O’Connor (The Crown) and Cailee Spaeny (Priscilla) among its cast. (Variety)

The upcoming long-awaited sequel Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy, which will premiere on Valentine’s Day next year, will include among its cast Isla Fisher, Nico Parker (How to Train Your Dragon), Josette Simon (Anatomy of a Scandal) and Leila Farzad (Black Mirror). They, of course, join Renee Zellweger, Hugh Grant and Emma Thompson in the movie along with newcomers to the franchise Chiwetel Ejiofor and Leo Woodall (One Day). (Variety)

The ubiquitous Nicholas Galitzine (The Idea of You) has been cast as He-Man, the blond barbarian who inspired the popular Mattel toy, in the upcoming film adaptation Masters of the Universe. (Variety)

Oscar winner Mahershala Ali is in talks to join the growing cast of the reboot of Jurassic World, joining the already announced Scarlett Johansson, Jonathan Bailey, Manuel Garcia-Rulfo and Ruper Friend.  Plot details are under wraps, though. (Variety)

Oscar nominee Sandra Huller and The Fall Guy and Barbie hunk Ryan Gosling are expected to star in the box office film Project Hail Mary, which is based on the Andy Weir novel about middle school science teacher Ryland Grace (Gosling), who wakes up on a spaceship with no memory of who he is or how he got there. He must figure out how to complete his interstellar mission to save Earth from an astronomical catastrophe completely alone, until he meets a mysterious alien who has traveled light years to save his own species from the same fate. (Deadline)

BROADWAY NEWS

The one and only Audra McDonald will play Mama Rose in the upcoming Broadway revival of Gypsy, which tells the story of an ambitious stage mom’s unflinching efforts to propel her two daughters into show business. (Variety)

That’s it. Enjoy!