Development news: Liam Hemsworth, Anna Faris grab starring roles

By Sarah Sluis

With the Oscar dust settling, Hollywood is getting back to developing new projects. Miley Cyrus' co-star in the upcoming teen movie The Last Song just snagged a big action role in upcoming 3D spectacle Arabian Nights. Liam Hemsworth will star as a young commander who teams up with Sinbad and Aladdin to rescue Princess Scheherazade. Inferno Entertainment, the production company, appears to have a distribution deal with Sony, though it is unclear if this film will be part of the pact. Liam's older brother is none other than Chris Hemsworth, who played Kirk in Star Trek and appears in upcoming Thor. Looks like a new Hollywood family is being born.

Hemsworth follows another teen hearthrob, Taylor Lautner, into 3D action territory. Lautner has just signed on to Stretch Armstrong, while his Twilight co-star, Robert Pattinson, has opted for a more dramatic route. This Friday, Pattinson's sromantic weepie Remember Me will open, par for the course in terms of his star image, but he is also appearing in Bel Ami, the period drama of a young French journalist who beds wealthy women. He's also on track to star alongside Reese Witherspoon and recent Oscar winner Christoph Waltz in Water for Elephants, a popular book club pick that is now being made into a movie. I wonder how the career choices of Hemsworth, Lautner, and Pattinson will pan out--is action or drama the best way to go?

On another note, an R-rated comedy starring Anna Faris called What's Your Number? is in the works. Faris will play a woman who discovers her number of lovers (twenty) is far above the Cosmo-dictated national average. With the help of a womanizing neighbor (Chris Evans), she revisits all of her lost loves with the hope of recycling one into the "forever" category. From a comedic standpoint, I like that the multiple exes will allow for many brief, funny moments as she reunites with each one. Plus, I think Faris is an incredibly talented comedian, stealing her scenes in Lost in Translation and Brokeback Mountain and turning The House Bunny into a sleeper hit. However, the drawback is--hello!--Faris and Evans will end up together in the end. Even the plot synopsis of the book the story is based on, 20 Times a Lady, mentions the predictability of the story and its stock characters. Knowing the ending at the beginning can be incredibly frustrating for the audience and will make the "funny" that much harder to accomplish, even with Faris in the lead.