Screen Talk: Goyer's counting on Cristo

Tinseltown Insider

David Goyer has signed to direct an adaptation of Alexandre Dumas' The Count of Monte Cristo (Getty Images)

David Goyer (above) has signed to direct an adaptation of Alexandre Dumas' novel The Count of Monte Cristo. Goyer's version of the story about Edmond Dantès, a young man betrayed and falsely jailed, will play more like Guy Ritchie's 2009 big-screen Sherlock Holmes reboot than a classic costume drama.

Life's a mystery for Jackman

Hugh Jackman is attached to star in a film adaptation of Harlan Coben's novel Six Years. Paramount is developing the project. The novel centres on Jake Fisher, who watched the love of his life, Natalie, marry another man. When he dies, Fisher goes to the funeral to see his lost love only to find the widow is not her.

Harlan hopes for a big-screen hit

Across town, Warner Bros acquired remake rights to Guillaume Canet's 2006 French-language thriller Tell No One, based on Harlan Coben's novel of the same name. It is the author's only novel to have made it to the big screen to date despite a run of five novels debuting at the top of the New York Times best-seller list. Worth the wait.

Fairy-tale pair are back in the hunt

Despite bombing in Hollywood eyes, taking only $54m at the US box office, a sequel to Hansel & Gretel: Witch Hunters has gone into development. It's because the movie, starring Jeremy Renner and Gemma Arterton as the grown-up fairy-tale characters, scythed down more than $150m outside the US.

Money movie has a sting in the tale

House of Lies actress Dawn Olivieri and The Newsroom's Thomas Matthews have joined the cast of David O Russell's new film. Originally named American Bullshit it is loosely inspired by the Abscam financial sting of the late 1970s and early 1980s. Jennifer Lawrence, Bradley Cooper and Amy Adams star.

Wiig would welcome this role

Kristen Wiig is in talks to reteam with Anchorman 2 cohorts Will Ferrell and Adam McKay for Welcome to Me. Wiig is eyeing the lead for the project – to be directed by McKay's wife Shira Piven –in which a lottery-winning woman with a dissociative personality who decides to make a cable-access talk show about her life.