Just Signed: Ice Cube Takes a Ride Along

The week’s casting news.

Movies

Two decades after he recorded “Fuck tha Police” as part of N.W.A., rapper/actor/brand manager Ice Cube joins the thin blue line in the new comedy Ride Along. The film, which is set to go before cameras this summer, casts Cube as a rebellious cop who decides to sabotage his sister’s impending marriage by taking her fiancé on a ride along that puts him in such dangerous (and, one hopes, comical) situations. Okay, so this doesn’t exactly sound like Friday. But it does sound a hell of a lot better than Friday After Next.

Harold Ramis let it slip to MTV that Ghostbusters III, which is currently being written by two scribes from NBC’s The Office, will reunite the original Ghostbusters and also make room for some new recruits. You know what that means…Ernie Hudson will be able to pay his rent next month!

James Franco showed some killer comic chops in last year’s Pineapple Express, so color us excited that he’s re-teaming with that movie’s director David Gordon Green and rising star Danny McBride for another comedy. This one is called Your Highness and it revolves around two medieval princes that reluctantly embark on a quest to rescue their kingdom from the grips of a powerful wizard. And the twist will be that they’re employees at Medieval Times restaurant!

J.J. Abrams‘ Star Trek reboot hasn’t even arrived on the big screen yet, but Paramount has already given the go-ahead to a follow-up, once again written by the same team of Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman and produced by Abrams. Fast work guys! Now let’s just hope that the first one really blows us away otherwise nobody is going to pay to see Part 2…uh, make that Part 12.

Gossip Girl creator Josh Schwartz will make his feature filmmaking debut with an adaptation of Jay McInerney’s ’80s New York story Bright Lights, Big City. The novel was previously made into a 1988 movie starring Michael J. Fox, but everyone—including the author—hates that version.

Emily Browning joins Vanessa Hudgens, Emma Stone and Evan Rachel Wood in Zack Snyder’s first post-Watchmen feature, Sucker Punch. Described by Snyder as being like Alice in Wonderland with guns, the film involves an asylum patient who escapes her grim reality by disappearing into an action-packed fantasy world. Does everyone fight in slow-motion there as well?

Filling the gaping hole left by the cancellation of MAD TV, Fox tapped comedienne Wanda Sykes to create and star in a hybrid news/comedy show for Saturday nights. According to reports, the show will tackle topical issues with a panel of guests while also sending Sykes out of the studio to file Daily Show-like field dispatches. We give it three weeks.

Morgan Freeman will lend his rich baritone to a new space-themed documentary series entitled Through the Worm Hole. Set to air on the Science Channel next year, the show will explore the possibility of extra-terrestrial life and the future of space travel.

For all those folks that still miss Xena: Warrior Princess, Lucy Lawless has heard your disappointed cries and is returning to television for the new series Spartacus: Blood and Sand, based on the legend of the famous Roman slave. Lawless will play the owner of the gladiator camp where Spartacus is whipped into fighting shape.