EXCLUSIVE: Oscar winning Bohemian Rhapsody star Rami Malek is in talks to star with Denzel Washington in The Little Things for Warner Bros. John Lee Hancock is directing his script and Mark Johnson is producing. The film will begin production in early September. Malek is making a deal to play a sharp young detective…

Hit Broadway musical Oklahoma! is coming to television for the first time after Jack Ryan producer Skydance Television partnered with The Rodgers & Hammerstein Organization and music firm Concord. The Blind Side's John Lee Hancock and This Is Us' Bekah Brunstetter are writing the present-day adaptation. The series…

EXCLUSIVE: Paramount Pictures is negotiating with Chris Evans to star for director Antoine Fuqua in Infinite, an adaptation of the D. Eric Maikranz novel The Reincarnationist Papers. The film is being produced by Lorenzo di Bonaventura and Mark Vahradian at Par-based Di Bonaventura Pictures, and John Zaozirny. Rafi…

Netflix announced today what Deadline told you last summer. Kevin Costner and Woody Harrelson are playing Texas Ranger Frank Hamer and ex-partner Maney Gault in The Highwaymen from director John Lee Hancock. This was the project that goes back far enough that it once had Paul Newman and Robert Redford ready to play…

EXCLUSIVE: Highwayman, the drama that once had Paul Newman and Robert Redford poised to play the veteran Texas Rangers who put an end to the violent robbery spree of Bonnie & Clyde, might finally find its way into production. Sources said Netflix is in early discussions to team Woody Harrelson and Kevin Costner as the…

Celebrated this season for his role as theoretical physicist Ian Donnelly in Denis Villeneuve’s brainy sci-fi film Arrival, alongside friend and frequent collaborator Amy Adams, two-time Oscar nominee Jeremy Renner this year hopes to bring attention to another, lesser-known role, as a producer on John Lee…

Oscar nominee Laura Dern, last competing for her role as Reese Witherspoon’s mother in Jean-Marc Vallée’s Wild, had a productive and politically charged 2016, finding roles in Kelly Reichardt’s Certain Women and John Lee Hancock’s Ray Kroc biopic, The Founder. In Reichardt’s film, Dern portrays a beat down, small town…

EXCLUSIVE: We are still about a month away from The Founder‘s nationwide release January 20, but while you’re waiting in the drive-thru line, here’s the first clip to emerge from the Weinstein Company film about McDonald’s founder Ray Kroc, played by Michael Keaton. Keaton, who received a Best Actor Oscar nomination…

EXCLUSIVE: At a time when the Best Actor aspirants are elbowing for position, watch out for Michael Keaton. A fixture in the last two Best Picture Oscar winners Birdman and Spotlight, Keaton this year arrives in the John Lee Hancock-directed The Founder. He plays Ray Kroc, who in his 50s evolved from a failing…

“One word: persistence.” That’s how Michael Keaton as McDonald’s “founder” Ray Kroc sums up the secret of his success. Expanded a bit to eight words it might be, as Nick Offerman’s burger-joint owner Dick McDonald says: “Orders ready in 30 seconds, not 30 minutes.” Here is the first trailer for The Founder, which…

EXCLUSIVE: The Blind Side helmer John Lee Hancock is in early talks with Disney to direct Saving Mr. Banks, the Kelly Marcel-scripted saga of how Walt Disney waged a 14-year courtship to persuade Australian author P.L. Travers to sell him rights to make a film out of Mary Poppins. Disney is near a deal to acquire the…

EXCLUSIVE: The Blind Side director John Lee Hancock has been set to write and direct The Partner, based on the John Grisham bestseller. The project is set up at New Regency, whose principal, Arnon Milchan, previously adapted the Grisham novels A Time To Kill, The Client and Runaway Jury, back in the day when Grisham…