By Jeff Sneider
TheWrap

Jennifer Ehle is in negotiations to play Anastasia Steele’s mother in Universal Pictures and Focus Features’ adaptation of “Fifty Shades of Grey,” an individual familiar with the project has told TheWrap.

Bing: ‘Fifty Shades’ casating backlash

Dakota Johnson will star as Anastasia, while Charlie Hunnam will play kinky billionaire Christian Grey.

Ehle has been offered the role of Carla, a strong Southern woman who is used to being pursued by men, seeing as how she’s on her fourth husband.

Also on TheWrap: ‘SNL’ Spoofs ‘Fifty Shades of Grey’ Screen Tests (Video)

Sam Taylor-Johnson is directing the film from a script by Kelly Marcel, who adapted E L James’ erotic novel. Michael De Luca and Dana Brunetti are producing the movie, which hits theaters Aug. 1, 2014.

Ehle recently played strong heroines in “Zero Dark Thirty” and “Contagion.” Her other credits include “The King’s Speech” and “The Ides of March.” She’ll soon be seen in “RoboCop” and the Kevin Costner drama “Black and White,” and joined the cast of the John Travolta heist film “The Forger” earlier Monday.

Ehle is repped by ICM Partners and Independent Talent Group.

Also on TheWrap: John Travolta’s Heist Movie ‘The Forger’ Adds Jennifer Ehle, Anson Mount

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) – Ever wanted to try on hairy Hobbit feet or wield Frodo’s sword?

Fans of Peter Jackson’s epic fantasy film series “The Lord of the Rings” will have the opportunity to bid on rare movie memorabilia, a Beverly Hills auction house said on Monday.

Props from Jackson’s “Lord of the Rings” trilogy will be up for sale at Julien’s Auctions on December 5, including a pair of prosthetic hairy Hobbit feet worn by one of the film’s main characters, Samwise Gamgee. The hairy feet are estimated to fetch between $15,000 and $30,000.

“It has been more than a decade since the first of the trilogy films was released and in that time only a handful of items from these films have ever been publicly offered for sale,” Martin Nolan, executive director of Julien’s Auctions, said in a statement.

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“Demand for this memorabilia is extraordinarily high and the scale and quality of this remarkable collection is truly a once in a lifetime opportunity for fans and collectors,” he added.

The total auction is expecting to fetch between $1 million and $1.5 million from the sale of 80 lots of memorabilia.

Other highlights from the fantasy realm of Middle Earth include the sword of lead character Frodo Baggins, played by Elijah Wood, estimated between $100,000 and $200,000, and a wizard staff belonging to Gandalf the White (played by Ian McKellan), expected to fetch between $50,000 and $70,000.

The auction house said that the rare props come from the private collection of one collector, and is the second largest collection of “Lord of the Rings” movie memorabilia, behind only Jackson’s own official archive of props.

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Jackson’s trilogy of “Lord of the Rings” films – 2001’s “The Fellowship of the Ring,” 2002’s “The Two Towers” and 2003’s “The Return of the King” – are adapted from J. R. R. Tolkein’s fantasy novels of the same name.

The story follows the journey of mild-mannered hobbit Frodo, who travels across the treacherous terrains of Middle Earth to destroy a precious ring that would make its wearer dangerously powerful.

The films grossed nearly $4 billion at the worldwide box office, one of the largest-grossing film series in history.

Jackson adapted Tolkein’s prequel “The Hobbit” into a second trilogy of films set in Middle Earth. “The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey” was released last year and has grossed more than $1 billion at the worldwide box office.

The second installment, “The Desolation of Smaug,” is set to be released in U.S. theaters on December 13.

(Reporting by Piya Sinha-Roy; Editing by Bernard Orr)

Entertainment Tonight.

Halle Berry has given birth to her second child, ET has learned.

PICS: Cutest Kids in Hollywood

The 47-year-old Oscar winner and her husband Olivier Martinez, also 47, welcomed a baby boy on Saturday. While this marks Berry’s second child (she has a five-year-old daughter, Nahla, with ex Gabriel Aubry) this is the first baby that the couple has had together.

In May, Berry called her pregnancy a miracle, saying, “It’s one of the best things that happened in my life, for sure.”

The actress can soon be seen on the small screen, having been cast in Steven Spielberg’s upcoming CBS drama Extant. In the series, Berry will star as an astronaut struggling to adjust to life on Earth after returning from a space mission.

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By Todd Cunningham
TheWrap

This weekend’s record-breaking $55.5 million blast-off for the space thriller “Gravity” was the biggest box-office opening ever for Oscar winners Sandra Bullock and George Clooney, but the real star may have been the movie’s spectacular 3D imagery.

Warner Bros. marketers pitched moviegoers the idea that the best way to see the the thriller from director Alfonso Cuaron — whose dynamic camera work and visual style have been the hallmarks of films like “Y Tu Mama Tambien” and “Children of Men” — was in 3D or on Imax. And the studio stacked the deck by offering 3D — with a roughly $3 or $4 ticket surcharge – at 3,150 of 3,575 theaters in which it played, as well as 323 Imax screens.

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It paid off. The $44 million in grosses from 3D represented 80 percent of the overall haul. Imax screens, which are also 3D, brought in $11.2 million, or 20 percent of the total receipts, the highest percentage ever for an opening of more than $50 million. The story was the same overseas, where 70 percent of the $27.4 million that “Gravity” brought in from 27 foreign markets came from 3D.

“We knew we were going to do well this weekend,” Warner Bros.’ head of distribution Dan Fellman told TheWrap, “but this surprised us.” Analysts had projected a $40 million start, but surging social-media buzz as the weekend drew near suggested something bigger.

Tell us on Facebook: Did you see ‘Gravity’? What did you think?

The 3D numbers for “Gravity” top those of two other movies known for groundbreaking visuals. Last year, the format accounted for 68 percent of the $24 million opening of Ang Lee’s “Life of Pi,” and 3D sales made up 72 percent of the $77 million opening of James Cameron’s “Avatar” in 2009.

Rave reviews for the Oscar hopeful — it’s a 98 percent positive on Rotten Tomatoes — were another box-office booster as “Gravity” soared to the best October debut ever, eclipsing the $52 million scared up by “Paranormal Activity 3” n 2011. Moviegoers agreed with the critics, and gave it an “A-” CinemaScore.

“Gravity” attracted an audience that was 54 percent male and 59 percent over the age of 35. The latter number, combined with strong CinemaScore and reviews which should build word of mouth, suggest it could play strongly through the awards season.

Also on TheWrap: How ‘Gravity’ Revolutionized Visual Effects and Blasted Sandra Bullock Into Space

The opening for “Gravity” was the best ever for the two leads. It easily beat the $39 million Bullock’s “The Heat” debuted with this summer and the $42 million that Clooney’s “Batman and Robin” opened to way back in 1997.

Last week’s No. 1 movie, Sony’s “Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs 2,” was a distant second with $21 million. The week’s other wide opener, the Justin Timberlake-Ben Affleck thriller “Runner Runner,” was overwhelmed and took in just $7.6 million.

Despite the pairing of Affleck, recently chosen to play Batman in Zack Snyder’s “Man of Steel” sequel, and the pop star Timberlake, domestic expectations were low for New Regency’s $30 million gambling thriller. But with this weekend’s grosses, it’s brought in $23.5 million from overseas and has worldwide total of $31.1 million for distributor Fox.

Three movies in their second week of release followed.

Universal’s Ron Howard-directed racing drama “Rush” brought in $4.4 million and to up its domestic total to $18 million. Relativity’s Joseph Gordon-Levitt sex comedy “Don Jon” is at $16 million after adding around $4 million this weekend. And Fox Searchlight’s comedy “Baggage Claim” was also just over $4 million for the weekend and has taken in $15.1 million overall.

The partly Spanish-language “Pulling Strings,” from Lionsgate’s Pantelion Entertainment, opened to $2.5 million from 387 theaters for a solid per-theater average of $6,460.

Pantelion is the company behind “Instructions Not Included,” the comedy that last month became the highest-grossing Spanish-language movie ever in the United States.

The top 10:

“Gravity,” $55.5M;
“Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs 2,” $21.5M;
“Runner Runner,” $7.6M;
“Prisoners,” $5.7M;
“Rush,” $4.4M;
“Don Jon,” $4.1M;
“Baggage Claim,” $4.1M;
“Insidious Chapter 2,” $3.8M;
“Pulling Strings,” $2.5M;
“Enough Said,” $2.1M

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By Todd Cunningham
TheWrap

Even Justin Timberlake and Ben Affleck, two of Hollywood’s heavyweight hunks, couldnt keep “Runner Runner” from stumbling out of the box-office blocks this weekend.

The R-rated thriller took in just $7.6 million over the course of its three-day U.S. debut, well under analysts projections, which were low to begin with.

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Thats not what you’d expect from one of the worlds biggest pop stars and the next Batman, said Exhibitor Relations vice-president and senior analyst Jeff Bock.

Timberlake last week was heading up the music charts with his new album “The 20/20 Experience: 2 of 2,” and Oscar winner Affleck was recently chosen to play the Caped Crusader in Zach Snyders upcoming “Man of Steel” sequel.

It’s quite a comedown for Affleck, who was last seen in “To the Wonder” earlier this year and before that “Argo,” last years box-office hit and Best Picture Oscar winner that he directed and starred in.

For Timberlake, it’s another off effort in an uneven film career that’s trending down of late.

The critics weren’t keen on the $30 million New Regency production it has a terrible 8 percent positive rating on Rotten Tomatoes and audiences didn’t like it much either, giving it just a “C” CinemaScore.

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Brad Furman (“The Lincoln Lawyer”) directed “Runner Runner,” in which Timberlake plays a college student who is cheated out of his tuition money playing online poker and confronts the offshore entrepreneur (Affleck) behind it. He becomes the kingpins right-hand man and winds up in a tight spot when the FBI wants to use him to bring the operation down. Leonardo DiCaprio is a producer, and Gemma Arterton and Anthony Mackie co-star.

Offering some solace for distributor Fox were the overseas grosses. With this weekend’s foreign receipts added in, “Runner Runner” has taken in $23.5 million from overseas.

In part because of his music roots, Timberlakes films have recently performed decently overseas even when disappointing domestically.

His two most recent movies, 2011’s “In Time” and last year’s Clint Eastwood baseball movie “Trouble With the Curve,” both under-performed in the U.S. “In Time” took in $135 million from overseas, however.

Early on in his film career, Timberlake bucked his squeaky-clean N Sync image with roles in gritty indie films like “Alpha Dog” and “Southland Tales.” He broke out with his portrayal of Napster co-founder and Facebook mentor Sean Parker in 2010’s “The Social Network.” And in 2011, he showed his comedy chops in “Bad Teacher” and “Friends With Benefits,” which was well-reviewed and lucrative, taking in $150 million worldwide for Sony Screen Gems.

With the crummy reviews and a marketing campaign that failed to ignite much buzz, “Runner Runner” was always in for a tough ride. And when it bumped up against the Sandra Bullock-George Clooney space saga “Gravity,” which posted an October record $55 million debut this weekend, its fate was sealed.

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NEW YORK (AP) — Steven Spielberg and George Clooney go way back in show business. In fact, it was Spielberg who gave Clooney his big break on the TV show “ER,” the actor recalls.

But the two Hollywood heavyweights came together Thursday evening for a different reason: Spielberg was honoring Clooney for his humanitarian work around the globe, especially in the Darfur region of Sudan.

At a glittery fundraising gala in the vast “Whale Room” at New York’s Museum of Natural History, the director and his USC Shoah Foundation presented Clooney with its Ambassador for Humanity Award. Also on hand to praise Clooney were his co-star in the new movie “Gravity,” Sandra Bullock, and Jon Stewart of “The Daily Show.”

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“George is the best kind of humanitarian,” Spielberg said. “The humble humanitarian.” The director called Clooney “an unparalleled example of action over apathy.”

Clooney told the crowd of donors that “Our job is to make it hard for the bad guys to do what they’re doing, and for the good guys to ignore it.”

The actor also praised Spielberg for his foundation’s work in creating and preserving video testimonies of Holocaust victims for future generations to learn from.

“We have to be able to keep a record of what the powerful can do to the powerless,” Clooney said.

The gala marked the 20th anniversary of Spielberg’s Holocaust movie “Schindler’s List,” a film that won the director an Oscar and, Spielberg says, gave him the idea to start a foundation that would record interviews with Holocaust survivors. To date, the foundation, founded in 1994 and based since 2006 at the University of Southern California, has collected nearly 52,000 eyewitness testimonies on video, in what it calls the largest digital collection of its kind in the world.

In an interview before the gala, Spielberg explained that a new, broader phase of the foundation’s work, begun recently, involves collecting video testimonies from survivors of genocide in places like Rwanda, Cambodia, and Armenia. “The origins of hatred haven’t gone away,” the director said. The foundation has already begun its work with testimony from Rwanda. The other countries will follow.

Spielberg said the only obstacle to further broadening the foundation’s work is funding, and the group announced during the evening that the gala had raised close to $3.7 million.

A further goal, Spielberg said in the interview, was to get the country’s public school systems to teach tolerance education. The director said his foundation is working on getting materials to schools to be used in social science classes.

He noted that Holocaust survivors are fast dying out, an even more important reason to preserve their life stories on video video that can be catalogued and indexed for easy access, which now makes up for much of the foundation’s work.

“The survivor community is vanishing,” he said. “Soon, it will only exist in cyberspace. But it’s a powerful community. We hope that through these testimonies, the survivors can live forever.”

Spielberg himself did not have relatives who died in the Holocaust. But his grandmother helped Hungarian Jews who had fled the Holocaust learn English in the United States. As a three-year old, he says, he learned his numbers from the “Auschwitz tattoo” of one of the survivors who gathered regularly in his home.

While making “Schindler’s List,” he said, he met survivors who would come to him and want to tell him their stories, starting from when they were children. “They just wanted me to listen,” he said. “They didn’t want to talk to their children about it. The fact that they wanted to tell a complete stranger what they couldn’t tell a daughter or son really moved me.”

Hanoi Jane to receive an award for her distinguished acting career. Nice going Hollywood. What career ? Barbarella? “On Golden Pond” was Her father’s starring role she was merely  a cameo.

More Hollywood politics I suspect !!!?????? Next we will hear about what a great Hollywood icon Roman( the pedophile) Polanski was.

WELLINGTON, New Zealand (AP) — Making “The Hobbit” movie trilogy has cost more than half a billion dollars so far, double the amount spent on “The Lord of the Rings” trilogy.

That figure includes the major shoots with actors, although there will likely be additional post-production costs as the next two movies are completed.

Through March 31, production had cost 676 million New Zealand dollars, or $561 million at current exchange rates, according to financial documents filed Friday in New Zealand, where the movies are being made.

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Distributor Warner Bros. and director Peter Jackson may consider it money well spent. To date, only the first movie in the latest trilogy has been released. “The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey” took in just over $1 billion at the box office.

The documents, filed online by New Zealand’s Companies Office, provide a rare insight into the exact costs of a Blockbuster Hollywood production. Often studios release only rough estimates, if anything.

When making the trilogy, Warner Bros. created a wholly-owned New Zealand company it named “3 Foot 7 Ltd,” in reference to the diminutive stature of the movie’s hobbits and dwarves. Company documents show that New Zealand taxpayers have so far contributed NZ$98 million to the trilogy through an incentive scheme designed to attract big budget movies to the country. Such schemes are common among U.S. states and foreign countries that compete for movies.

The trilogy also appears to be one of the most expensive movie productions in which two or more movies are shot at the same time.

Both Box Office Mojo and Guinness World Records estimate the most expensive single movie ever made was “Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End” with an estimated $300 million production tag. That movie, in conjunction with “Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest” — which was shot at the same time held the previous record for the most expensive total production, costing an estimated $450 million to $525 million.

According to Box Office Mojo, Jackson’s previous trilogy, “The Lord of the Rings,” cost a total $281 million to make. The Star Wars prequel trilogy, meanwhile, cost $343 million, according to Box Office Mojo, which tracks movie costs and box office receipts.

In making “The Hobbit,” New Zealand director Jackson chose to shoot both in 3D and at 48 frames per second, rather than the standard 24, in the hopes of giving audiences greater picture clarity and a more immersive experience. Both techniques added significant expense. The higher frames per second received mixed reviews, as did the movie itself, which starred Martin Freeman as the title character.

The trilogy is based on J.R.R. Tolkien’s novel of the same name and traces the adventures of hobbit Bilbo Baggins as he attempts to help a group of dwarves regain their wealth and stature from the dragon Smaug. “The Hobbit” is the prequel to Tolkien’s “The Lord of the Rings,” which was made into a movie trilogy that was also directed by Jackson.

The second movie in the latest series, “The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug” is due out in December while the final movie, “The Hobbit: There and Back Again,” is due out in December 2014.

Warner Bros. representatives this week replied to emails sent by The Associated Press but did not immediately provide answers to a series of questions about the “The Hobbit” budget.

By Brent Lang
TheWrap

“Avatar” director James Cameron came up with the idea for those blue skinned aliens and the planet Pandora on his own, a Los Angeles Superior Court judge ruled Wednesday.

The filmmaker has been battling a plagiarism lawsuit by Eric Ryder, who claimed Cameron stole the idea for a 3-D environmental epic from a story he wrote called “K.R.Z. 2068.” Ryder filed in 2011, claiming that Cameron’s production company Lightstorm Entertainment had commissioned him to craft a motion picture out of his idea, but later cut him out of his rightful share of the profits.

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Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Susan Bryant-Deason granted Cameron’s motion for summary judgment, dismissing Ryder’s suit in its entirety, a spokesman for 20th Century Fox, which distributed the film, told TheWrap.

Gregory Albright, an attorney for Ryder, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

In her decision, Judge Bryant-Deason ruled that it could not be disputed that “Avatar” was independently created by Cameron.

It’s not the only lawsuit Cameron has faced regarding the origins of “Avatar.” Last January, a federal court judge dismissed a complaint by Gerald Morawski, saying that “clear, undisputed evidence shows Cameron independently created ‘Avatar’ and did not use Morawski’s ideas.”

Morawski, an artist by trade, said he gave the director the concept for about a native tribe that lives in harmony with the rainforest, but is forced to fight off a mining company, during a business meeting decades before the film was made. “Sadly, it seems that whenever a successful motion picture is produced, there are people who try to ‘get rich quick’ by claiming their ideas were used,” Cameron said in a statement. ” Several such claims have been asserted in connection with ‘Avatar.’ I am grateful that our courts have consistently found these claims to be meritless. As I have previously stated, ‘Avatar’ was my most personal film, drawing upon themes and concepts that I had been exploring for decades. I am very appreciative that the Court rejected the specious claim by Mr. Ryder that I used any of his ideas in my film.”

“Avatar” is the highest grossing film of all time, having earned nearly $2.8 billion worldwide. Cameron plans to make three sequels to the 2009 hit.

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Elizabeth Olsen has been confirmed as a castmember in “The Avengers: Age of Ultron.”

The actress has been linked to the role of the Scarlet Witch for months, and now Samuel L. Jackson, who plays Nick Fury in the Marvel franchise, has told The Wall Street Journal that Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen’s sister will be on-set when the sequel starts shooting next year.

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He tells the publication, “I know we’re shooting in London, that James Spader is Ultron and going to be the bad guy, and that we added Ms. Olsen, but I don’t know what she’s doing, if she’s on the inside or the outside. I haven’t seen a script.”

The film is set for release in 2015 and also features returning “Avengers” castmates Robert Downey, Jr., Scarlett Johansson, Chris Hemsworth, Mark Ruffalo and Jeremy Renner.