While you never want to make a career decision in haste, there is something to be said for taking too much time to think things over. Did Jim Carey take too long in deciding his next project?

Deadline is reporting that the comic actor has signed on to the comedy Ricky Stanicky after circling it for “bout a year.” It finally took the signing on of Carey’s Ace Ventura: Pet Detective director Steve Oedekerk that convinced that actor to take the plunge.

The film revolves around a group of friends who, as teenagers, invent a fictional friend, Ricky Stanicky, to take the fall for their various antics. They continue to use the excuse into adulthood, but when their wives demand to meet Ricky, they hire someone to be him. The report doesn’t say which part Carey is taking for the film but I would suspect that it is that of the actor hired by the friends to be “Ricky.”

Zoe Saldana is in talks to appear in Marvel Studio’s The Guardians Of The Galaxy. She would appear as Gamora, one of the titular intergalactic superheroes. A skilled assassin, the green-skinned Gamora is the last of a species that was exterminated by a race known as the Badoon.

Saldana’s casting comes as a bit of a surprise as she was not named on a reported shortlist of actresses under consideration by the studio back in January. She is joining Chris Pratt and Dave Bautista who have already signed onto the comic book adaptation.

This will make Saldana’s third space-set franchise, after having appeared in James Cameron’s Avatar and J. J. Abrams’ Star Trek.

With director James Gunn looking to start production on the film in June, expect more casting notices in the weeks to come. Guardians Of The Galaxy is scheduled for an August 1, 2014 release.

Via Hollywood Reporter.

The Kickstarter campaign to fund a big screen Veronica Mars film still has a few days left to go but with more than two times their target amount in donations, the film is definitely on its way. And now the first cast member from the original television series beyond star Kristen Bell has committed to the film.

Deadline is reporting that Jason Dohring has been confirmed to reprise his role as bad boy Logan Echolls when cameras start rolling later this year, especially since creator Rob Thomas has stated that the film will happen around Veronica’s 10-year high school reunion.

No word as to any other returning cast members yet, but I doubt that this will be an isolated incident.

So far we’ve seen a number of people cast to play human characters in the upcoming Dawn Of The Planet Of The Apes – including Jason Clarke, Kodi Smit-McPhee, Keri Russell and Gary Oldman. Today comes word of the first actor who will join the returning Andy Serkis to portray one of the ape characters in the film – Judy Greer.

Vulture is the first to report that the actress will be getting into a motion-capture suit in order to play Cornelia, an ape who could be a possible love interest to Serkis’s Caesar. She’ll be replacing dancer Devyn Dalton, who played the character’s brief appearance in 2011′s Rise Of The Planet Of The Apes.

I have to confess that I am a bit puzzled by this casting. Greer is probably best known for her comedic turn on Arrested Development or her numerous supporting roles in romantic comedies, not anything that would indicate a penchant for the more physical, dramatic role that this will undoubtedly entail. But Serkis himself must see something in her abilities. The two co-starred in the romcom 13 Going on 30 and it was Serkis who encouraged her to go out for the role.

Greer won’t have much research to do for the role, as she tells Vulture that her husband is a Planet Of The Apes uber-fan.

I married a man who … I’m gonna use the word obsessed. He is obsessed with Planet of the Apes. We had a chimp husband-and-wife cake topper at our wedding. At the cocktail hour, we played Planet of the Apes and Rise of the Planet of the Apes on two separate televisions in the bar area. And on the wedding gift I bought him, a vintage Rolex, I had it engraved, ‘Ape shall not kill ape.’ I was then told that, technically, it’s ‘Ape shall never kill ape,’ but there wasn’t enough space for engraving purposes.

Captain America: The Winter Soldier has gained another villain in the form of UFC fighter Georges St-Pierre. The Welterweight Champion will be playing the french super bad guy Batroc the Leaper.

Batroc the Leaper? Really?

For those unfamiliar with the character, Batroc is a costumed mercenary who is skilled in the martial art known as savate. Although he was portrayed as an accomplished fighter his French accent often seemed, to this Marvel Comics reader at least, to be overwritten to the point of ridiculous, although in recent years it has seemed to be written a bit more realistically.

But I have to express some surprise that the character is appearing in Winter Soldier. The film already has its titular villain in the form of actor Sebastian Stan, while Frank Grillo has been cast to play the mercenary Crossbones. Add in the fact that Toby Jones is set to return as the Nazi scientist Armin Zola and we already have a pretty packed roster of bad guys for the film.

St-Pierre, has previously appeared in two martial arts films directed by Hector Echavarria, Death Warrior and Never Surrender.

Filming on Captain America: The Winter Soldier is expected to start later this spring for a April 4, 2014 release.

Via Latino Review.

In what is probably the biggest casting surprise of the year, Robert Redford is talks to appear in Marvel Studio’s Captain America: The Winter Soldier. Deadline is reporting that the iconic actor will be playing a ranking official in the spy organization SHIELD, which is run in the Marvel films by Samuel L. Jackson’s Col. Nick Fury. Marvel has not yet commented on the report.

Redford has been in a number of films that make him a good fit for the film’s tone, which studio honcho Kevin Feige has described as “political thriller.”

Although there is no firm word about the components of the deal, I would not be surprised if Redford was signed for appearances in multiple, to-be-named-as-they-go films, so we may see Redford appearing in The Avengers 2, Ant-Man, Iron Man 4 or any other film the studio has in development.

Equally vague is the character whom Redford will be playing. All we have to go on is that he has “a senior leadership role in SHIELD.” While discussing the casting with our Comic Book Film editor William Gatevackes suggested that he might be playing an older, “slow-aged” Dum-Dum Dugan, noting a resemblance between Redford and Neal McDonough, who played World War Two-era Dum-Dum in the 2011 Captain America: The First Avenger. (In one of the deleted scenes on the Avengers blu-ray we see Steve Rogers, aka Captain America, looking through the dossiers of his old WWII buddies and seeing that of some of them had died while he was in suspended animation, but Dum-Dum Dugan’s file isn’t seen.)

Joe and Anthony Russo are directing the film from a script by Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely. Captain America: The Winter Soldier is scheduled for release on April 4, 2014.

Tom Cruise is in early talks to headline Warner Brothers’ big screen revival of the 1960s spy spoof television series The Man From U.N.C.L.E. Director Guy Ritchie, the man behind the studio’s popular Sherlock Holmes films featuring Robert Downey Jr., took over developing the project after Steven Soderbergh dropped out.

No writer has been announced for the project.

The original series ran from 1964 to 1968 and starred Robert Vaughan and David McCallum as Napoleon Solo and Illya Kuryakin as two agents of the United Network Command for Law Enforcement fighting the evil forces of THRUSH.

Frankly, it is beginning to look like Cruise is hogging up all the franchises. He already has the Mission: Impossible series and it is looking as if last year’s Jack Reacher, based on an installment of Lee Child’s mystery novel series, may launch a series. And yes, Cruise probably still have enough clout to open a movie, especially when tied to a known quantity like U.N.C.L.E. would be, but I would still like to see someone else get a shot at the role.

Via Deadline.

Comic Sarah Silverman is in talks to join Seth MacFarlane’s western comedy A Million Ways To Die In The West. According to the Hollywood Reporter, Silverman is up for the role of a prostitute who “engages in all sorts of lewd activities but refuses to have sex with her fiancé (Giovanni Ribisi), believing that as Christians the couple should wait until marriage before lying down together.”

Silverman joins a heavyweight cast that already consists of MacFarlane, Charlize Theron, Liam Neeson and Amanda Seyfried.

The film’s story centers on a meek sheep farmer (MacFarlane) whose girlfriend (Seyfried) leaves him after he chickens out of a gunfight. However a mysterious woman (Theron) helps him discover his courage just in time to defender her from her outlaw husband (Neeson).

MacFarlane has scripted the movie with his Ted collaborators Alec Sulkin and Wellesley Wild. A spring start for the film is expected.

I guess Bryan Singer got tired of tracking down his actors’ Twitter handles, because his latest cast reveal for X-Men:Days of Future Past  comes in the form of a picture. And as you can see above, the picture tells us a story–there are three heretofore unknown cast members. HINT: They are the last three on the bottom row.

Thanks to Brendon Connelly and his Little Bleeders over at Bleeding Cool, we have put names with head shots. And those names are Daniel Cudmore, Booboo Stewart, and Bingbing Fan. And yes  those last two are real actors and those are the names they really go by.

Daniel Cudmore should be no stranger to the fans of the X-Men films, as he played Colossus in X2: X-Men United and X-Men Last Stand. Since Colossus played such a pivotal part of the  comic book storyline, it is only fitting that the character would be in this version of it. Of course, Cudmore’s Colossus has really played as big a part in the film franchise as he does in the comic books, so his inclusion doesn’t really tells if the film will follow the comic closely.

Cudmore has been spending his X-Men film downtime appearing in the Twilight franchise, playing Felix. Perhaps Bryan Singer asked Cudmore for advice on what new actors to bring into the franchise, because new addition Booboo Stewart also starred in the Twilight franchise as well, playing Seth.

Booboo Stewart is the son of stuntman/actor Nils Allen Stewart (and Booboo’s given name, according to IMDB, is Nils Allen Stewart Jr. ) and has appeared in guest parts in numerous TV shows and movies over the years. Like his father, he has also worked as a stuntman as early as the age of 10. And if his involvement in the Twilight Saga wasn’t enough to get the Comic Con Illuminati up in arms, he also spent some time as a Disney tween pop star, touring with Miley Cyrus and the Jonas Brothers.  Oh, and he also was a model. That’s quite a busy life and he’s not even twenty.

It is not know which X-Men character Booboo Stewart will be playing in the film, but our other new addition to the cast will be playing an iconic character from the books, according to Deadline.

Bingbing Fan is a Chinese actress who is quite famous in her native land, if she is rather unknown here in the States. Her films Double Xposure and Lost in Thailand, both released in 2012, broke box office records in China. She was also rumored to have been up for a role in Iron Man 3, but which role has not been confirmed.

What character will Fan play in Days of Future Past? She will play the mutant teleporter, Blink.

Blink debuted in comics in 1994 as part of the Phalanx Coveneant storyline and made only a few appearances before she was killed off. She proved popular enough that she was resurrected a year later as part of the alternate reality storyline, Age of Apocalypse, which occurred when a villain went back in time and killed Professor Xavier, allowing the villain Apocalypse to conquer the world. While that alternate reality didn’t last long, the character found life in the various volumes of Exiles, a superhero team consisting of heroes for various alternate universes banded together to keep all realities safe.

The inclusion of Blink’s character, and her connection to Apocalypse, might lend credence to the rumor that Apocalypse would be the bad guy of the film. And if you wish to extrapolate further, you could run with the theory that Days of Future Past will be a combination of the film’s namesake storyline and the Age of Apocalypse storyline, that it will be Xavier’, not a Senator’s or JFK’s, assassination that will bring on the dystopian future the time traveler is trying to avoid, and that the dystopian future in question will resemble the Age of Apocalypse.

Or, the script could simply call for a teleporter, and since Alan Cumming would be too busy to reprise his role as Nightcrawler, they picked another teleporter from the comic book canon to take his place. Could be that too.

Either way, we’ll find out more as the films 2014 release date approaches.

There are lots of actors returning to the X-Men franchise for the upcoming X-Men: Days Of Future Past, but it looks like Jason Flemyng will not be one of them.

Speaking to the Irish newspaper The Independent, the actor who played evil mutant Azazel in 2011′s X-Men: First Class, that he won’t be back for the the next installment of the franchise scheduled to start shooting later this spring but he’s not too broken up by that.

I don’t think I will be back. Initially I was gutted, but then, I remembered I had to get up at two in the morning, I had to be painted red and be slightly out of focus and posed a lot, and that was sort of it. Now I don’t have to do that.

When the film does start shooting, director Bryan Singer will be welcoming James McAvoy, Michael Fassbender, Nicholas Hoult, Jennifer Lawrence and former X-Men cast members Halle Berry, Hugh Jackman, Sir Patrick Stewart and Sir Ian McKellen to the set.