Just Signed: Bruce Is Back in Action

The week in casting news

Bruce Willis has kept a low profile since the fourth Die Hard movie became a surprise hit in 2007, but there’s a reason the actor has been M.I.A. from the screen for the past two years: he’s trying to decide between three different action films for his next project.  On the one hand, he could star in Red, which would cast him as a retired black-ops warrior pressed back into service when a rogue assassin sets his sights on taking out him and/or his girlfriend.  Another possibility is Scarpa, a biopic about FBI informant Greg Scarpa who spent several years deep undercover in the infamous Columbo mob family.  That film would re-team Willis with director Antoine Fuqua, with whom he worked with on 2003’s Tears of the Sun.  Last but not least is Inventory, yet another cop thriller about a weary detective trying to track down a vicious killer.

Rising star Noureen DeWulf—seen this weekend in the romantic comedy Ghosts of Girlfriends Past—has gotten a plum part in Jennifer Lopez’s next film, The Back-Up Plan.  Lopez stars as a woman who has given up on ever finding the right man to have a baby with and decides to go the sperm bank route instead.  However, right after being artificially inseminated, she meets the dude of her dreams.  Hilarity supposedly ensues.  DeWulf will play a sarcastic employee who works in Lopez’s hip downtown pet store.

Remember how crazy New York got when the first Sex and the City movie shot here a few years ago?  Well, Manhattanites better prepare themselves for a whole new wave of street closings and paparazzi fights this September when Sex and the City 2 goes before cameras.  The four gals are all back and Chris Noth just agreed to reprise his role as Mr. Bradshaw…uh, I mean Mr. Big to the tune of seven figures.  Please no diarrhea jokes in this one, okay?

Two decades after Gordon Gekko coined the immortal mantra “Greed is good,” his real-life alter ego Michael Douglas and director Oliver Stone return to the scene of their 1987 hit Wall Street for Wall Street 2, which once again finds a newbie to The Street (possibly played by Shia LaBeouf, who is in negotiations right now) getting in over his head after going to work for Gekko.