— Everyone’s favorite Nixon/Skeletor, Frank Langella, will aid Liam Neeson in the thriller “Unknown White Male.” Neeson plays a man who awakens from a coma to discover that his doppelganger has taken over his identity. Langella will play a colleague of Neeson’s character who comes to his aid, and joins January Jones and Diane Kruger in the cast. Shooting starts in Berlin next month.
— Meanwhile, the scribe of Neeson’s hit “Taken,” Robert Mark Kamen, has sold his pitch “Vengeance” to CBS Films. Kamen tells Variety “Basically, it’s a contemporary revenge love story – what happens when violence meets love. The main characters are 2o and Italian, and there are themes that echo films like “The Godfather.” It’s about family loyalty and how much someone owes their family and the past. It’s not set in the gangster milieu, but just outside it.” Kamen has, along with Luc Besson, completed a script to a sequel for “Taken.”
— Peter Jackson has been plugging his disastrous “The Lovely Bones,” and talked to Ain’t It Cool about “Temeraire,” an adaptation of a fantasy novel series that has long been thought to be Jackson’s next film as director. The series, which creates an alternative past, where the Napoleonic Wars are fought using an air force made up of dragons, is now likely to stretch to nine books, and Jackson is now thinking of tackling it as a big-budget cable miniseries, not unlike HBO’s “Game of Thrones.”
— The comic-book series “The Hunter,” by British writer Adam Hamdy, has been optioned by Scarlet Fire Entertainment. The book focuses on a CIA counter-terrorist operative with special powers, trying to solve a series of co-ordinated attacks on America.
