Robert Zemeckis is Making a Movie With Real People Again

Plus: Paul Greengrass keeps the topical thrillers coming

Today, in film and television: Robert Zemeckis commits to his first non-motion capture film in more than a decade, Paul Greengrass books another topical thriller, and Fox is reportedly still trying to remake Romancing the Stone.

• Robert Zemeckis has finally come to his senses and committed to direct Paramount's Flight, a real live movie in which a real live Denzel Washington play an airline pilot who is not what he seems. It will be the director's first film since Cast Away in 2000 not to be made using motion capture technology, which is good news if you enjoy movies where hair moves in the wind, different clothes have different textures, and nobody's eyes look like creepy black marbles. To make Flight, Deadline notes, Zemeckis has had to drop out of Replay, another "real" movie about a man who can't stop travelling back in time. [Deadline]
• Days after novelist and screenwriter Robert Harris let it slip to the Telegraph that Flight 93's Paul Greengrass would be directing the adaptation of his upcoming novel The Fear Index, Greengrass's representatives confirmed to Deadline, yes, Paul Greengrass will be directing The Fear Index. Based on what we pieced together from The Telegraph article and Amazon's description of the book, in which a physicist-turned-hedge fund magnate invents a seemingly flawless market algorithm tied to the the market's so-called "Fear Index," only to wake up one night with intruders in his home and global markets collapsing, it has the potential to be a megahit like The Da Vinci Code, or at least The Firm. The novel will be published in England next month, but American readers will have to wait until January to devour their copies. [The Telegraph]
• American audiences will finally be able to get a look at the Julia Roberts film Fireflies in the Garden, three years after the ensemble drama about a Midwest family coming to terms with things premiered at the Berlin Film Festival, says The Hollywood Reporter. The film spent three years in limbo after production company Senator Entertainment shut down before securing a domestic release. Five of the film's producers regained the rights to the property and will release it themselves in theaters in Los Angeles, New York, Chicago and San Francisco on October 14. They'll at least have some high-recall names on the marquee to lure ticket buyers.Along with Roberts, the cast includes Ryan Reynolds, Willem Defoe, Carrie-Anne Moss, Ioan Gruffud and Hayden Panettiere. [The Hollywood Reporter]
• A "trusted source" is supposedly telling film blog Moviehole that Fox is "inching closer" to a reboot Romancing the Stone, a charming and in some circles beloved 1984 adventure film about a romance novelist and soldier of fortune who run afoul of private militias and Danny DeVito in the jungles of Colombia. The original was directed by Robert Zemeckis (him again!) and starred Kathleen Turner and Michael Douglas as the mismatched romantic leads. The report says Taylor Kitsch and Gerard Butler top the studio's "early wish list" for the Douglas part, and that Katherine Heigl is under consideration for the Turner role. The good news, explains Yahoo film blog The Projector, is that a remake/reboot/rehash of Romancing the Stone is "something Fox has been working on since at least 2008, so this could stay in development hell forever." And Heigl's name was being floated back then too.