the industry

Chris Pine Joins the Ranks of Skilled Thespians Who’ve Played Jack Ryan

Can’t Stop, Won’t Stop: Just a day after signing on to the latest D.J. Caruso joint, Chris Pine has entered serious talks to be the next Jack Ryan, the CIA analyst created by Tom Clancy. The character has previously been played by Alec Baldwin, Harrison Ford, and Ben Affleck, but never by a beer-swilling spaceship captain. [Variety]

Family Affair: Following in the footsteps of Shelley Long (as he is wont to do), Benjamin Bratt will guest star on ABC’s Modern Family as the ex of one of the shows main characters. Long, of course, is set to appear as the ex of family patriarch Jay Pritchett (Ed O’Neill), while Bratt will play the ex of Pritchett’s younger, hotter wife Gloria Delgado-Pritchett (Sofia Vergara). Fingers crossed this leads to a Bratt, O’Neill throwdown. And our money’s on Bundy. [HR]

She Writes Too!: Universal and Imagine have snagged the rights to Rashida Jones’s graphic novel Frenemy of the State and plan to have Jones write the script with Will McCormack, an actor who’s been on TV a few times. The “adventure script” (as Variety calls it) is about a wealthy young heiress who goes undercover with the CIA. Presumably, it’s all an attempt to get close to Jack Ryan. [Variety]

Power Couple: Gus Van Sant and Bret Easton Ellis are teaming up to write a movie about enigmatic couple Theresa Duncan and Jeremy Blake. They’ve acquired the rights to a Vanity Fair article by Nancy Jo Sales that tells the story of the visual artist and his video-game designer wife who fall into a world of all-consuming paranoia, largely based around perceived harassment by the Church of Scientology. If you read the story (and you should) you’ll know how it ends. But we’ll let you make that call. [Variety]

Iron Man: Mark Palansky , who directed 2006’s Penelope, has signed on to helm action-adventure Iron Jack. The script, which sparked a bidding war last year, is set in the 1930s as a famous novelist goes on the hunt for a legendary treasure. No word on casting yet, but we hear Nic Cage knows a thing or three about treasure. [Variety]

Chris Pine Joins the Ranks of Skilled Thespians Who’ve Played Jack Ryan