Following Brett Ratner’s resignation in the wake of his insensitive comments toward shrimp, gays, rehearsal, Olivia Munn, and Asians, the Academy has named as his replacement Brian Grazer, probably best known as Ron Howard’s producing partner, and for constantly looking as sweaty and coked out as Brett Ratner probably actually is. Also, he came up with the idea for Splash (true story). Most recently, Grazer produced Brett Ratner’s Tower Heist, so you figure the Academy must really have thought long and hard about this decision.

Grazer, a producer of the upcoming J. Edgar, was at the top of the list of producers whom Sherak approached to come aboard and co-produce the show along with the previously announced Don Mischer. Grazer’s first order of business will be naming a new host.

“Brian Grazer is a renowned filmmaker who over the past 25 years has produced a diverse and extranordinary body of work,” Academy president Tom Sherak said. “he will certainly bring his tremendous talent, creativity and relationships to the Oscars.” [THR]

With Eddie Murphy out, presumably his replacement will be someone else from the cast of Tower Heist. I vote for Gabourey Sidibe, but only if she does the whole thing in a Jamaican accent.

“‘ey, mon, I hareby awarrd dis year’s Os-carr for Most Tasty to dees roast-tad cheeckan. A nuh mi like vegetable, BUH! BUH! …Now, whare da bumbaclot ‘tief dan stole me Krispy Kreme? BANDULU! Fess up, nah! Which wan a you bal’ ‘ead gwan tief me donut?!”

Famously hideous ginger Ron Howard is looking for a project to direct before his ambitious adaptation of Stephen King’s Dark Tower next year, and word on the street is that he’s considering a live-action adaptation of Spy vs. Spy, the old Mad Magazine cartoon about glorified stick figures who one-up each other. Might I suggest Terrence Howard playing both parts?  The man is a master of similar-but-different clothes and hats.

A live-action bigscreen version [of Spy v Spy] is moving forward at Warner Bros for Ron Howard to direct. David Koepp will produce with Howard and his Imagine Entertainment partner Brian Grazer. Right now, Koepp will oversee a script that will be written by John Kamps. Kamps just teamed with Koepp to write Premium Rush, the Sony Pictures movie directed by Koepp, who also just rewrote the Jack Ryan film for Paramount Pictures. The film will be a physical and highly visual action comedy with two spies going mano a mano in ruthless fashion.
Spy Vs. Spy will be down the line for Howard, who always has a busy dance card. As Howard and Grazer and Akiva Goldsman prepare to turn in the rewrite of The Dark Tower over the next couple of weeks to see if Universal Pictures will fund the ambitious adaptation of the Stephen King novel series planned to span three films and two TV series runs, Howard has been eyeing projects he might be able to squeeze in before. [Deadline]

Look, I know we say it so much that we’ve become numb to it, but does it ever just boggle your mind how unbelievably dumb Hollywood people are?  Spy vs. Spy is a minimalist cartoon, the spy movie boiled down to its absolute essence.  A movie made out of that is like an online role-playing game about arm wrestling, or a five-course French supper made entirely of MREs.  I guess what I’m trying to say is, Ron Howard is a goblin and we should lock him in a dumpster before he bites someone.

Seeing Ben Stiller get puked on and rehash decade-old jokes in the Little Fockers trailer was pretty sad.  Luckily, his career takes a giant leap forward today with the news that he’ll soon be doing a film called Tower Heist with our nation’s finest filmmaker.  I speak of course of Brett Ratner.  Or as I like to call him, Alfred Itchcock.

Ben Stiller stars as the overworked manager of a luxury building who, along with other staff, lost their pensions to a Bernie Madoff-like Wall Street crook. It so happens that the fraudster is being held under house arrest in the luxury penthouse apartment upstairs, and the manager and four cohorts figure a heist will make them whole.

The project originally got set up under the title Trump Heist, when the intention was for an African American ensemble to target The Donald. Trump got evicted, as did the African American cast idea.

“It has become the quintessential New York heist movie, where a bunch of blue collar employees in a tower building pull off the ultimate heist,” Ratner told me. [yes, who could forget all those blue collar working stiffs who lost their money to Bernie Madoff. -Ed] The move away from Trump really began with Ted Griffin, who, Ratner reminds, originally wrote Ocean’s Eleven for him to direct.  “I didn’t get to do that movie, I did Rush Hour instead, but I went back to Ted to do a rewrite, and he wanted to start over. His pitch was so good that I took it to Brian [Grazer], who said, ‘let’s get it right.’ I brought the script to Ben on the Little Fockers set, and said this is perfect for you. He was looking at other projects like Mr. Popper’s Penguins (which went to Jim Carrey), I asked Noah Baumbach  to do some specific character work for Ben. Then my Rush Hour guy Jeff Nathanson brought it home.” [Deadline]

Ratner continued, “Jeff Nathanson brought it home.  After that we played xBox for while, got hella stoned and just went to town on some Totino’s pizza rolls. Then I passed out for a while.  I’m not sure where the script went after that.  I think my bro Steve might have it.  Yeah, that’s it, you should probably ask Steve.”

Robin Hood: Anatomy of a Clusterf*ck Or Origin Story? More like BORE-igin story.

Robin Hood is a disaster. True, you might not notice it right away. You might make it through 40, 50 minutes, an hour of it without realizing it.  But like the women I make sex to, by the time it ends, you will be angry and disappointed, I guarantee it. If you aren’t, you weren’t paying attention. But hopefully, by remembering what happened here, we can prevent future disasters.  NEVER AGAIN.

A few years back, Kelsey Grammer starred in a fact-based movie for HBO about the Bradley fighting vehicle. The gist of it was that Kelsey Grammer was overseeing a big defense contract to create this new military vehicle. It started out as a troop transport, but somewhere along the way, someone suggested that it should also have a big gun. So they gave it a big gun. Then someone else said it should be really fast, to do reconnaissance, so they tried to make it light and fast. Then someone else said that in addition to being light, it should have heavy armor to protect the passengers, so they gave it more armor. They kept trying to implement all these suggestions, and a billion dollars later, they had “a troop transport that can’t carry troops, a reconnaissance vehicle that’s too conspicuous to do reconnaissance, and a quasi-tank that has less armor than a snowblower, but carries enough ammo to take out half of D.C.”

Robin Hood is that vehicle.

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Stretch Armstrong is SO not impressed with the Human Torch's flaming ability

Well this is some shocking news.  When the studio hired Steve Oedekerk (Evan Almighty, Barnyard, Patch Adams) to write their Taylor Lautner-starring Stretch Armstrong 3D movie, I naturally assumed he’d be the last writer they’d ever need.  I mean, come on, Evan Almighty!  Bizarrely, they felt a rewrite of Oedekerk’s script was in order, so they hired Forgetting Sarah Marshall director Nicholas Stoller.  They also hired Monsters Vs. Aliens director Rob Letterman (who’s currently working with Stoller on Gulliver’s Travels) to direct.  Brian Grazer will produce, along with Dickensian villains Brian Goldner and Bennet Schneir from Hasbro.

I don’t know what the hell Nick Stoller is doing rewriting a Stretch Armstrong movie starring Taylor Lautner, but hey, it’s a paycheck, I guess.  I supposed I’d liken the writer of Stretch Armstrong to the person you’d hire to scrub semen off the booths at a peep show.  At the beginning, you hire some retarded kid, someone who doesn’t know any better, to soak up those really big, encrusted glops of jizz (the retarded jizz-glop-soaker in Stretch Armstrong‘s case being Steve Oedekerk). Once that part’s done, say you want to sell the place or whatever, then you can spend a little more money on a professional detailer like Nick Stoller.  He’s probably still gonna get a little spunk residue on his sponge (unless you found a really good retard, like a hybrid autistic retard, say), and it’s not something he’ll want to put on his resume… But hey, the economy, am I right?

[via ComingSoon]