Mark Wahlberg has worked with Jonathan Demme, Paul Thomas Anderson, Tim Burton and Martin Scorsese.

But the former rapper is really excited to work with his next director, M. Night Shyamalan.

“The first scene we shot was a five-page scene in a classroom that any other director I’ve worked with would have taken three days to shoot, but we shot it by lunch,” Wahlberg said about his work with Shyamalan on The Happening.

“It’s beautiful. I’ve never walked into a trailer where your sides are there and your storyboards are there for the day. He just knows what he wants.”

And we love seeing what the director wants on screen… ignoring the piece of junk that was The Lady in the Water.

Set amidst a worldwide catastrophe that has the planet fighting back against humanity, infecting people with a neurotoxin which makes them want to kill themselves, Wahlberg insisted The Happening is more character study than apocalyptic vision.

“My wife, played by Zooey Deschanel, is a therapist. The movie is about our relationship and the conflicts we’re having set [amid] this kind of horrific disaster,” Wahlberg said. “I play kind of a nerdy science teacher from Philadelphia - the best teacher you’ve ever seen, but I have difficulties in being the man she wants me to be. I am extremely positive and optimistic and she’s the opposite.”

Brett Ratner will be directing a biopic about Hugh Hefner, titled Playboy.

So, with Playboy looking to get the fast track to your local multiplex, MTV decided to do some casting.Who should play Hef?

How about…

Ewan McGregor – The only thing stopping us from loving this idea is Ewan tends to fall a little flat when he goes American.

Hugh Jackman — He’s got more charm in his pinky than Jude Law’s got in his Alfie wannabe body. Plus, Ratner and Hugh seemed to get along alright on X-Men: The Last Stand.

Owen Wilson — He’s the butterscotch stallion, people! And, judging from our subscription to TheHollywoodGossip.com, he’s been preparing for the role all his life.

David Duchovny — He projects intelligence and a sexy subversive edge. But is he bankable without Gillian Anderson by his side?

Johnny Depp — We’re not really sure why, except that we know he’ll do something interesting with it.

Russell Crowe — When you want a hit of testosterone from your leading man, who do you turn to if not Crowe?

Iron Man director Jon Favreau has announced the end of principal photography on his MySpace group, and indirectly confirmed rumors that Hilary Swank will have a cameo in the film:

Principal photography ended with a huge bang as we filmed the final scenes of Iron Man in Caesar’s Palace. As many of you already know, gambling is a casino’s top priority. A production can not interfere with their cash cow. As a result, movies must shoot during the dead hours, no matter if it’s Swingers or Rain Man.

We were given a window of midnight to one the next afternoon to do all of our work. Part of our strategy to prepare for these ungodly hours was to stay up as late as possible the night before and sleep as late as possible. I did half the plan. The wrong half. I stayed out until 7AM and then woke up four hours later. After motoring through the delerium of a sleepless shooting marathon, I am proud to report that we have handily completed our movie on time and on budget. What a great way to end.

I would also like to thank Ceasars for their hospitality, generosity, and Swank accommodations.

Ah, we get it. Swank accommodations. This guy’s good.

Yup, it’s an older, wiser - but still heroic - Indiana Jones.

Next summer, Harrison Ford is reprising the role film buffs love him the most in. We’ve uncovered the first picture of Indiana from the movie’s set. Enjoy:

We all knew Katherine Heigl was beautiful and talented even before Knocked Up hit theaters.

But who knew Seth Rogen was so funny? Below, he answers questions from ComingSoon.net…

ComingSoon.net: So this is the last day, huh?
Seth Rogen: It is, kinda. We’ve got a DVD day, I guess.

CS: What’s a DVD day?
Rogen: It’s a day where we shoot s**t just for the DVD.

CS: Interviews and stuff?
Rogen: No, like bits. We invite every actor we know, basically, to come in and just shoot extra content, kind of.

CS: Like the “Special Edition” DVD?
Rogen: No, we’ll put it on the regular DVD. Like for Superbad, for example, me and Bill played cops, so we did this thing, like for a whole day we just invited every actor we know to come in and play criminals we busted. We just shot in front of a green screen and kind of improv’d all day long with every actor we know. We’re kind of doing the same thing with this. We have different people buying weed from Danny McBride and stuff. We have this part in the movie where it’s like the government marijuana testing in the ’30s. So we’re like doing that for the DVD. We just have people coming in and being test subjects.

CS: Who’s coming in?
Rogen: I think Rudd’s coming. I’m not sure what the big list is. Charlene Gi. We’ll see if Jonah’s in town. Michael, Sarah, just whoever’s in town. Schwartzman maybe. David Krumholz I think is coming. I don’t know who else. I haven’t looked at the final list. It’s our regular band of misfits. I think Martin Star is coming. Leslie Mann I think is coming. I think Judd might shoot something. It’s whoever’s in town. We’ll see. (Laughs) You get $300 bucks.

CS: Superbad is based on your experience in high school?
Rogen: Kind of. I mean, it’s so confusing to explain, even for me. There was never that night. That never happened to us. But like some of the stories – the pee your blood thing, for example. A lot of the people’s names are real. Just our friends getting fake IDs and stuff like that. But we kind of like just combined it all… I mean we never had any separation anxiety going to different… I didn’t go to college, so that didn’t play into it.

I was just a loud mouth assh**e in high school, and Evan was just a slightly less loudmouth assh**e. That we took from our lives, I guess. But Michael was much cuter than Evan ever was.

CS: You and Evan wrote the screenplay as well for this, right?
Rogen: Yeah. This came from years ago, actually, in like 2001. Judd paid for Evan to come here for a summer. This is after “Undeclared” got canceled, and basically just had us generate movie ideas all summer. And this was not one of them. After we handed Judd our list of ideas, he said, “Ah, write a weed action movie.” And we said, “Ok.” And that’s basically where it came from. He had the notion that there was a process server for some reason, which we went with, that witnesses a murder. And the notion, basically, was: Would you quit smoking weed if your life literally depended on it. That was kind of our starting off point. And then it really turned into this kind of examination of drug dealer/drug buyer relationship and how awkward that could be. All our movies are thinly veiled homoerotic love stories.

And this is no exception, I would say. So that’s where the idea came from. We didn’t even like the idea at first: “That sounds terrible. A weed action movie?” We really got into thinking like, but if that was good, it would be our favorite movie of all time. So we decided to kind of shoot for the stars, I guess. If we saw a trailer for a good weed action movie, we’d be the first ones there to buy a ticket. So it’s tailor made for us. I know I’ll enjoy it.

CS: How would you describe the comedic tone of Pineapple Express?
Rogen: By nature, just having two knuckleheads do physical things it becomes somewhat slapsticky. It definite – in a good way, I think – develops this kind of Laurel and Hardy feel to it, just kind of two idiots trying to avoid danger and violence whenever they can, but our big inspirations were movies like True Lies and Lethal Weapon and Midnight Run, these action comedies of the ’80s and early ’90s. We try to play it real. Our general mantra at all moments is kind of, what would you do in that situation? The situations are definitely ridiculous at times, but I think tonally we try to keep it as straight as possible and not reach for the jokes so much as kind of letting it play out. You just have two really stoned guys shooting machine guns, you don’t really need to try to make that funny (laughs).

CS: You’re the buyer and James is the dealer.
Rogen: Yes. It was originally written the other way actually. I was kind of the goofy sidekick and Franco was kind of the straight leading guy and we were like, “That doesn’t seem as exciting as it could be.” So we decided to flip it. And I think it’s really funny. He’s amazing doing the character. At the first table read, I was like, “F**k. He’s way funnier than I would have been doing that.” (laughs) Thank God we did that. He thinks we’re friends, but I just think he’s my pot dealer. And throughout the movie it comes out that I don’t actually even like him. I just kind of pretend to be nice to him because he sells really good weed. But he really thinks that we’re friends and kind of really wants to be friends. And then I kinda slowly realize that he’s actually my only friend. (laughs) He’s actually the only person that I talk to.

CS: What is surprising about working with Franco? He’s basically a serious actor.
Rogen: I worked with Franco years ago, and what was surprising is that I always thought he was hilarious. He was really funny. I mean, most of our scenes in “Freaks and Geeks” were comedic ones. If anything, I was surprised when he was suddenly dubbed this “serious actor.” That term is so weird. But he definitely seems to get that, being a serious actor. But it’s exactly the same as it was. We both have a lot more experience, I would say. Personally, I’m much more comfortable in front of the camera than when we did “Freaks and Geeks.” So it makes it a little easier if anything. But it’s awesome. I love working with him; that’s why we decided to do it. We always got along really well. He’s funny as hell.

CS: How did he end up working with you guys?
Rogen: We just thought, let’s ask Franco to do it. (laughs) It’s really simple sometimes. Yeah, it was easy as that.

CS: And he had to leave for a little bit to finish Spider-Man 3?
Rogen: He left for his press tour. He had this giant run of publicity. He left for two weeks. But there’s a good chunk of the movie that he’s not in, so he didn’t miss much.

CS: And you’re about to do press for Knocked Up, which has a ton of buzz surrounding it. What’s that like?
Rogen: It’s nice that it’s good buzz. It must suck doing this for a movie that no one likes. It’s really nice that people seem to like it. That’s kind of where it ends for me. It’s nice. I don’t feel insane. When we were making it, it’s like, “If people don’t like this, then we’re crazy. ‘Cause it seems really funny to us.” So we’re not nuts. That’s nice.

CS: Has Judd stopped by?
Rogen: Yeah, he’s come by quite a bit. They’re doing “Walk Hard” and “Forgetting Sarah Marshall” simultaneously. [He] was around more at the beginning when we were kind of finding our legs. David’s directed a lot of movies before. And I think it kind of becomes his own means of prioritizing where he needs to spend his time on set. It’s funny, he describes it as he just pretends he’s running a TV show and instead of episodes they’re movies. And he just has different writers on them. It’s funny because it’s exactly like that. And it’s all the same writers from “Undeclared.” Nick Stoller is now directing “Sarah Marshall” and Jake Kasdan’s doing “Walk Hard”. It’s literally like he’s doing a TV show. (laughs) The writers are just running the episodes.

To read the rest of this interview, click here.

We’ve already reported on He-Man coming to theaters near you soon. Now, another classic cartoon is also hitting the big screen.

More than 20 years after they put their first hurtin’ on the evil Mumm-Ra and his band of bad guys, Lion-O, Panthra, Snarf and the rest of the Thundercats are finally going to kick some ass on the big screen!!! Thundercats, hooooo!!!

Warner Bros. has put plans in motion to turn the cult ’80s cartoon classic into a live-action project.

The upcoming adventure flick is set to be produced by Paula Weinstein, Dick Robertson and Lew Korman.

No timetable has been set yet for a release.

A Canadian author is suing Universal Pictures and director Judd Apatow, alleging that the story for the hit movie Knocked Up was taken directly from her book of the same name.

Rebecca Eckler claims that she shopped around her 2004 book to be made into a movie. In the middle of the process, she learned of the Apatow project. The script that was making the rounds, she alleges, had a picture of a martini glass with a pacifier around the stem - the same as on the cover of her book.

Eckler, who told her tale in this month’s Maclean’s magazine, cites other similarities - including the fact that the Katherine Heigl character is an up-and-coming television reporter, and the main character in Eckler’s book is an up-and-coming newspaper reporter. She also says that the movie and book have a secondary female character in common - the person that both main characters go to for advice - and that both of the secondary characters have screaming children.

The lawsuit was filed in a federal court in January, alleging copyright infringement and seeking unspecified damages.

Judd Apatow, through his reps, released this statement:

“The book ‘Knocked Up’ is very different than the film Knocked Up. The book is about a woman who gets pregnant by the fiance that she loves on the night of her engagement party. The film is a very different story; the film is about a one-night stand between a pot smoking slacker and an ambitious young woman that leads to a pregnancy and their attempts to get to know each other. Anyone who reads the book and sees the movie will instantly know that they are two very different stories about a common experience.”

Warner Bros. has moved up the release date of Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix by two days. The fifth film in the fantasy series has been shifted from a Friday, July 13 opening to a Wednesday, July 11 big-screen bow.

The studio’s move will likely cut into the box office reign of Transformers, which opens the previous weekend, and is sure to wreak havoc on the schedules of thousands of Potter devotees who already planned to take Friday off.

Phoenix follows Harry Potter (Daniel Radcliffe) as he returns for another year at Hogwarts and discovers that much of the wizarding community is in denial about the teenager’s recent encounter with the evil Lord Voldemort, preferring to turn a blind eye to the news that Voldemort has returned.

Fearing that Hogwarts’ venerable Headmaster, Albus Dumbledore, is lying about Voldemort’s return in order to undermine his power and take his job, the Minister for Magic, Cornelius Fudge, appoints a new Defense Against the Dark Arts teacher to keep watch over Dumbledore and the Hogwarts students. But Professor Dolores Umbridge’s Ministry-approved course of defensive magic leaves the young wizards woefully unprepared to defend themselves against the dark forces threatening them and the entire wizarding community, so at the prompting of his friends Hermione and Ron, Harry takes matters into his own hands.

Meeting secretly with a small group of students who name themselves “Dumbledore’s Army,” Harry teaches them how to defend themselves against the Dark Arts, preparing them for the battle that lies ahead.

Directed by David Yates from a script by Michael Goldberg, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix will run in standard and large-format theaters. The IMAX version will have an unprecedented for the series 3-D finale.

All directors promise that their sequels will be bigger and flashier than the predecessors’. But Christopher Nolan doesn’t mess around.

The director’s sequel to Batman Begins, The Dark Knight, will become the first feature film to be partly shot in the IMAX format, an expensive and cumbersome process that typically is the province of documentaries and short films.

Nolan will shoot four action sequences — including the introduction of the Joker, played by Heath Ledger — on IMAX.

The move is one of Hollywood’s most pronounced steps yet in its embrace of IMAX theaters, which are increasingly showing commercial fare on their giant screens.

“There’s simply nothing like seeing a movie that way,” Nolan says. “It’s more immersive for the audience. I wish I could shoot the entire thing this way.”

Typically, the feature films that play in IMAX theaters are simply stretched out to fill the enormous screens. That can dilute the picture quality and give the movie a wide, squat look.

Shooting on IMAX, Nolan says, will have a twofold effect. The four scenes will fill the IMAX screens, some of which are eight stories high. And in traditional theaters, the scenes will appear more vivid (think high-definition television over standard).

Don’t expect many movies to follow suit. Only 280 IMAX theaters are in operation worldwide, and fewer than 100 show feature films.

And shooting in the format is difficult. IMAX film, which is 10 times the size of standard film stock, is costly and must be shot using bulky cameras.

And “they’re loud,” Nolan says. “We had to figure a way to eliminate the sound so we could shoot dialogue.”

In a rarity for Hollywood, the payoff isn’t primarily financial, so far. “It doesn’t have a huge effect yet on the money you bring in,” says Chris Aronson, a distribution chief with 20th Century Fox, which carried Night at the Museum on IMAX. “But it does help make your movie more of an event.”

For Nolan, IMAX makes the moviegoing experience unique again.

“You can’t do this on any home theater,” Nolan says. “Batman has some of the most extraordinary characters in pop culture. We wanted the Joker to have the grandest entrance possible.

“I figured if you could take an IMAX camera to Mount Everest or outer space, you could use it in a feature movie.”

SOURCE: USA Today

Baseball has Eight Men Out and The Natural.

Boxing has Cinderella Man and Raging Bull. Heck, even golf has The Greatest Game Ever Played.

For fans of America’s true sporting pastime, however, cinematic nostalgia has been far too fleeting…until now, that is. OnDecember 7th, George Clooney aims to pay homage to pigskin’s early days with the film Leatherheads.

“We just wrapped [it],” Pirates of the Caribbean co-star Jonathan Pryce told MTV News. “It’s about the creation of American pro football in 1926 when they brought in the rules.”

The movie is directed by Clooney, who penned the script with frequent collaborator Steven Soderbergh.

“Clooney’s wonderful,” Pryce said. “I think it’s going to be really good.” Make no mistake, however, this is no Good Night, and Good Luck,” Pryce joked. “It’s a kind of screwball comedy.”

So with Clooney quarterbacking the production, where do all the other stars line up? “George plays for a ragtag, over-the-hill football team. They attract [The Office star] John Krasinski, star college football player to come and play. I’m [his] sleazy agent and manager,” Pryce divulged.

[There’s a] bit of a scandal involved. Renee Zellweger, ace reporter, is dispatched to expose [it].”