The last year has been a very good one for high profile comedies, with several new movies that have been both hilarious and very profitable. When that magic mixture is achieved you can be sure that the principles are going to be getting a lot more work.

Two of the more surprising successes of the year were Bridesmaids and Horrible Bosses and now it looks like key members from both films are joining forces on their next project. Deadline is exclusively reporting that director Seth Gordon has tapped Melissa McCarthy to star along side his Horrible Bosses star Jason Bateman in his next film, Identity Theft.

McCarthy was one of the best parts of Bridesmaids and has made a lot of strides towards mainstream popularity in the last twelve months. Between an Emmy for her work in Mike & Molly and stealing the show on a recent Saturday Night Live, it will be interesting to see if she can parlay that momentum into starring role success.

Seth Gordon, on the other hand, is finally showing off why people were excited about his vision after his great debut documentary The King of Kong. Hopefully working together will bring their careers to new levels of greatness, because the world can always use great female comedy leads and strong comedy directors.

After setting up a new version of Robocop and Carrie, MGM’s reboot-o-rama continues with their plan to take the 1983 John Badam hacker thriller War Games and bring it to new audiences. With that in mind, the studio has tapped director Seth Gordon to develop the reboot and direct.

As you may know, Gordon first rose to prominence with the gaming documentary The King of Kong and most recently directed the upcoming comedy Horrible Bosses with Colin Farrell, Kevin Spacey, Jennifer Aniston, Jason Bateman, Jason Sudeikis and Jamie Foxx.

In case you’re not familiar with War Games (although that’s unlikely), it starred Ally Sheedy as his girlfriend and Matthew Broderick as a computer hacker who finds a back door into a military computer system. Once inside, they start to play a nice game of “Global Thermonuclear War” which, unfortunately, isn’t a game to the computer. This sets off a series of events that if not stopped, could lead to WWIII.

Gordon will reportedly have a lot of leway in creating the reboot and with the level of sophistication of computer games, hardware and software these days, the results could be pretty interesting indeed. Gordon seems like a pretty good choice for this reboot.

Certainly better than the last time they tried to capatalize on War Games by making the abyssmal “sequel” War Games: The Dead Code. What a disaster that was. Let’s hope Gordon has better luck.

My first and, in an academic capacity, only economics teacher was a big, brutish-looking but very intelligent man named Carilli. The official goal of the class was to teach us the basics of the dismal science, but Carilli’s true aim was to challenge our way of thinking. And challenge he did. As an English major, my specialty was simply posing questions—“What does the green soldier in The Red Badge of Courage signify?”

“What is Ahab’s nailing of the gold coin to the mast really signify?”—and, nine times out of 10, the best answer was “We may never know.” But Carilli wanted something definitive. “Why aren’t there any great baseball players anymore?” would be a standard question, followed by a lot of head-scratching from me and my peers, and before I could work up the courage to mouth a “We may never…” he’d take pity on us and answer, “Because basketball pays better. The top athletes go into that, because that’s what the people watch—and that’s what makes money.”

That’s the kind of question Freakonomics would ask, and its greatest strength is taking what most would think of as a relentlessly boring subject and making it interesting.

The film presents itself almost as a term paper, with the thesis that incentives matter, and applies it to everyday life, correlating data to explain why you should keep your house on the market if you expect a higher payoff later instead of a lower payoff now or why Sumo wrestlers cheat.

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Though February is considered Black History Month, this year it seems that Hollywood is turning it into “Reboot Month”. Less than two weeks into the month, and we’ve already gotten word on a reboot for Daredevil, The Thing, Gunsmoke, Hawaii Five-0, and word that the Spider-Man reboot will be in 3-D.

It seems that Tinseltown and New Line Studios is setting their sights on another classic franchise, in National Lampoon’s Vacation. The original, which started in 1983, beget 4 sequels, including the direct-to-DVD film Christmas Vacation 2: Cousin Eddie’s Island Adventure. From Variety:

The latest project, which will no longer carry the National Lampoon credit, is being described as more of an update than a sequel and will be closer in tone to “Planes, Trains and Automobiles” than the previous chapters. Story will focus on Rusty Griswold, now a grown man, who decides to take his own wife and kids on a road trip to Wally World before it closes forever. Chase is not attached at this time to reprise his role as Clark Griswold, now a grandfather.

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