Harrison Ford is definitely considered a living legend for his iconic roles in two geek-beloved franchises. And now he will meet a living legend in his own mind – the iconic San Diego news reporter Ron Burgundy. The Hollywood Reporter is stating that the actor has signed on to appear in the Will Farrel comedy Anchorman 2: The Legend Continues.

Ford will be playing a well known national news anchorman when the sequel begins production in Atlanta later this month.

In addition to Farrell, this sequel to 2004′s Anchorman: The Legend Of Ron Burgundy will see the return of Steve Carell, Paul Rudd, Christina Applegate and David Koechner.

Honestly, outside of the Star Wars and Indiana Jones pictures, I’ve not found the moments where Ford has been called upon to act comedically to be all the funny. Hopefully director Adam McKay can get a solid and funny performance out of Ford for the film. But his casting is the first qualm I’ve had

When Ron Burgundy and the Channel 4 News Team return, they may be joined by Kristen Wiig.

The Wrap is reporting that the former SNL cast member is being considered for a role in the upcoming Will Farrell sequel where she would play the love interest of Steve Carrell’s weatherman Brick Tamland. Of course, this isn’t any kind of an official casting announcement as the film is still being written, although with an announced October 2013 release date, things should be shifting into high gear soon.

In addition to Farrell and Carell, the rest of the original Anchorman cast will be returning for Anchorman: The Legend Continues including Christina Applegate, David Koechner and Paul Rudd.

It looks as if the missing piece of the Anchorman 2 puzzle has been found. Christina applegate will be back to play newswoman and Ron Burgundy main squeeze veronica Corningstone.

It was sports reporter Champ Kind himself, David Koechner, who confirmed Applegate’s involvement, as well as the fact that the film will be set in the late `70s, right at the emergence of the 24 hour cable news networks. The news comes from a summation of a quick chat with Koechner at gossip site Perez Hilton (via Bleeding Cool).

Koechner’s comments echo director Adam McKay’s statement back in April concerning the film’s setting and how it would fuel some of the comedy.

We know these guys never deal well with change and the good thing is that there’s a big blast of change coming, according to the regular timeline. We’re going to be throwing a lot of innovation at them, and they’re not going to handle it well. It’s right when all the news started changing with the 24-hours news cycle in ’78 or ’79. All of a sudden, local news stations diversified and had Latino anchors and African-American anchors, and any time you’re talking about diversity and the Action News team, that’s always fun to deal with.

With that in mind, I would not be surprised if part of the plot would involve Veronica getting a gig with a certain Cable News Network and Ron not handling things very well when she becomes more successful and famous than him. Pure speculation, mind you, but this might be one way to connect the few dots we to connect right now.

It looks as if Will Farrell and company were not content to release just one teaser trailer last week for the upcoming Anchorman 2. Today that trailer, as well as a new one, have turned up online. Granted, the two are very similar and probably grew out of the same kind of improvisation that happened on the set of the first Anchorman film.

Personally, I think that I like the Funny Or Die trailer a bit more if only for the inclusion of noted newsman Bill Kurtis reprising his role as the narrator from the first film.

There hasn’t been a frame of footage shot and the script might not even been finished, but Paramount has already prepared a teaser trailer for Will Farrell’s much anticipated sequel to Anchorman: The Legend Of Ron Burgundy and it will premier in theaters tomorrow attached to the front of the Sacha Baron Cohen comedy The Dictator.

San Diego’s favorite news anchor himself took to Twitter to make the announcement-

The tweet also included a link to a new picture of Burgundy, who, let’s face, is still looking classy.

In addition to Will Farrell returning for the film, it has already been confirmed that Steve Carell, Paul Rudd and David Koechner will all be back to play the rest of Ron’s Channel 4 news team cohorts. Filming should be getting underway relatively soon and while there is no official release date announced, I would expect it sometime next year.

In a new interview with Britain’s Empire magazine, Anchorman: The Legend Of Ron Burgundy director and co-writer Adam McKay admitted that the script for the recently announced sequel is not much more than “five pages of story notes and chunks of story.” Not much there, but there is apparently enough to supply McKay with a tidbit or two to dish out.

We know these guys never deal well with change and the good thing is that there’s a big blast of change coming, according to the regular timeline. We’re going to be throwing a lot of innovation at them, and they’re not going to handle it well. It’s right when all the news started changing with the 24-hours news cycle in ’78 or ’79. All of a sudden, local news stations diversified and had Latino anchors and African-American anchors, and any time you’re talking about diversity and the Action News team, that’s always fun to deal with.

It certainly sounds as if they are heading in the right direction, and have a good handle on what really drove the comedy of the first film. McKay went on to state that he and Anchorman star and co-writer Will Farrell will be working on the script over the next three months and that they are already planning on having another epic gang fight between San Diego’s rival news teams. I don’t know about you but this movie can’t get here fast enough.

Now that the initial wave of joy over Paramount’s surprise decision to move forward with a sequel to Will Farrell’s 2004 comedy Anchorman: The Legend Of Ron Burgundy has settled somewhat, I have found myself wondering how they were going to be able to continue the story of San Diego’s most prominent newscaster.

Adam McKay, the director of the first film, has offered up two hints as to what that answer may be. In an interview with Salon he detailed the process of how Paramount changed their mind on doing a sequel (“a movie had fallen through for them, their view on it had kind of changed and that was it.”) and gave away two crumbs of information about the screenplay her is developing with Farrell -

I don’t want to give away too much, but I’ll just give a couple pieces of ideas that we’ve kicked around. Keep in mind we’re still writing the story, but I’ll say one phrase for you: custody battle. I’ll give you that. I’ll give you one other one: bowling for dollars.

I would guess that “custody battle” would imply that we will see the love of Ron’s life, Veronica Cartwright, making a return for the new movie. But as for “bowling for dollars,” I’m at a loss. But I can’t wait to find out.

1. The Other Guys (Sony/Columbia, 3,651 Theaters, 107 Minutes, Rated PG-13): First off, I might be alone in saying this, but I’d probably be first in line for a cop buddy movie starring Dwayne Johnson and Samuel L. Jackson. I just thought I’d say that.

That pair plays a hot-shot police unit that Mark Wahlberg’s character aspires to be. Unfortunately, he accidentally shoots Yankees shortstop Derek Jeter, which places him on the police Z-list, partnered with nebbishy Will Ferrell.

It seems like a concept that could work. It is another entry in the Ferrell/Adam McKay union, and I have liked pretty much every other film they made (although they are an acquired taste). And this film has Michael Keaton in it! He is one of my favorite actors and not seen as often as he should be. This film is on my list of must see flicks.

2. Step Up 3D (Summit Entertainment/Touchstone Pictures, 2,435 Theaters, 107 Minutes, Rated PG-13): Hey! It’s my two least favorite movie trends joined together: inspirational dance films and 3-D!

I’ll have to admit, as much as I dislike 3-D, this type of film is a unique venue for it. The acrobatic style of dancing seems like it would be a good fit for 3-D.

Here is the synopsis, cut and pasted from IMDB:

A tight-knit group of New York City street dancers team up with an NYU freshman and find themselves pitted against the world’s best hip hop dancers in a high-stakes showdown that will change their lives forever.

I imagine this film will be different from every other film where an outsider joins a tight-knit group of dances to enter a contest that will change their lives forever.

Is Twitter becoming the new way for actors and directors to let fans know the status of their projects in development? It certainly seems that way.

On the heels of Anchorman: The Legend Of Ron Burgundy writer/director Adam McKay tweeting that Paramount had passed on a proposed sequel to that film, Ben Stiller made a cryptic comment on his Twitter feed, hinting that the in-development sequel to his 2001 comedy Zoolander, may have met a similar fate -

Ron Burgundy and Derek Zoolander looking to appear in sequels. Both men destitute, without means or intellect to fund their own comebacks.

So what is it with Paramount these days? While Zoolander might not have the built in audience that Anchorman has, Stiller could definitely pull in much of the audience that helped his 2008 film Tropic Thunder earn $110 million at the box office.

Wait a minute… There is a link between the two projects- Will Ferrell, who played the villainous fashion designer Mugato in Zoolander, rumored to return in the proposed sequel. (Stiller would show up in a small role in Anchorman a few years later.) Does someone at Paramount have a vendetta against Ferrell? Probably not, but what reason could Paramount have for passing on two potential moneymakers from well established comedy stars?

Is that much talked about Anchorman: The Legend Of Ron Burgundy ever going to happen? In the ironic wake of having seen Anchorman 2 showing up on a couple of “movies that are never going to happen” lists on other websites recently, it’s looking better than it has in a while that the sequel will be going before cameras early next year.

Anchorman‘s director Adam McKay spoke with MTV’s Movie Blog, telling them that while some of the holdup in getting a sequel moving has been financial, it hasn’t been negotiations over salaries for the cast.

It’s a tricky movie because everyone went and did really well after it, so everyone’s prices went up and everyone’s time got a little more valuable. But at the same time, graciously, Steve and Paul and everyone agreed to cut their price to come and do [the sequel], which you don’t see very often in Hollywood — and cut their price substantially. But even with that, it’s just a budgetary thing with Paramount in terms of how much they’ll give us to make it.

The first Anchorman was made for just $26 million and sold $85 million in tickets at theaters and found a further audience thanks to home video. McKay thinks that a second film could be even more successful for the studio.

Austin Powers didn’t make a ton of movie in its first go-round and then it caught fire in the next one. We’re hoping they’ll look more at that sort of projection.

Of course, the second (and third) Austin Powers flicks repeated a lot of the jokes found in the first film, but it sounds like instead of finding more things to do in the 1970s, a second Anchorman film will move the channel 4 news team of Will Farrell, Christina Applegate, Steve Carell, Paul Rudd and David Koechner in to the next decade.

That’s loosely what the idea is. [The '80s angle is] more the frame of it. We have this other, bigger, crazier idea that’s really more what it’s about, which I can’t say. Our thinking was there’s just no way the second one is going to be as good as the first, because the first one is the first one. So our idea is if we’re going to do a second one, we better go for it and try some insane stuff and we’ll be enjoying it and that way it can’t be half bad.

An Anchorman sequel seems like a no-brainer to me. The cast had a great chemistry, and it is evident that the film was a labor of love for everyone involved. So much so that in addition to the DVD release, a second disc entitled Anchorman: Wake-Up Ron Burgundy was cobbled together from out-takes and storylines cutout from the finished film. Best Buy also released an exclusive bonus disc that contained a further 30 minutes of cut footage. If the cast is willing to take paycuts, they’re not making the movie as a quick payday. If Paramount were to give the go-ahead for Anchorman 2, I expect that they will wok just as hard.