'Animal House': The Musical?

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The Call Sheet sifts through the day's glut of Hollywood news to find the stories even non-industry types can care about. Today: Broadway claims another beloved movie, HBO passes on a dude show, and Jeff Goldblum heads to TV.

Because everyone everywhere has been clamoring for it for nearly 34 years, Universal has announced plans to turn the cult hit Animal House — about hard-partying frat brothers at a Dartmouth-esque college — into a stage musical. Terrific! Just what the doctor ordered. Broadway musicals always do debauchery really well, it's just such a wild demographic, so this fits perfectly. Even better news about this project? The always-relevant Barenaked Ladies will be writing the score. So hopefully there will be lots of jokes about monkeys and emus and stuff. Woohoo! Party on, Broadway! What a great idea. [The New York Times]

From great news to terrible news. HBO has decided not to go forward with the new show from Entourage creator Doug Ellin. Why is genius always so thwarted? This latest would-have-been masterpiece was called 40 and was about four friends (Ed Burns, Michael Rapaport, Michael Imperioli, and Adrian Pasdar) who all help each other figure out life once they turn 40 years old. So it would be Entourage: The Twilight Years. Or maybe Men of a Certain Age: The Prequel. You know, something good. About men. Being men together. Why would HBO pass on this? Have any of the network execs seen what the television landscape looks like? There are just not enough shows about men and the fact that they are men. We need more shows like that, because otherwise how will people know about men? What will America, nay the world, think about men without Doug Ellin's gentle hand guiding their opinions? It's just really troubling. Won't somebody please think of the men?? [Deadline]

ABC's new great white hope (it's very white) GCB premiered to only modest numbers last night. With a 2.2 rating and 7.6 million viewers, it wasn't a bomb, but it certainly could have done better. It's Sunday night on ABC, after all. That's, like, when all the women across the country lock their kids in the basement or in a closet and all collectively gather around the television to watch all the Lynettes and Greys and Snow Whites and whoever else do their thing. Sunday night on ABC is basically the most important thing to ever happen to moms, so you need to go big or go home to stick around in that lineup. And GCB didn't go big. So... we'll have to see if it goes home. The moms have spoken, though. Oh have they spoken. [The Hollywood Reporter]

Several people have been cast in television pilots! First, Winning London star Jesse Spencer (he was on some doctor show too, but really his biggest credit to date is Winning London) has been cast as the lead on the firefighter pilot Chicago Fire. It's unclear whether he'll play Chicago or the Fire, but either way, we think it's a great casting choice. Sure we'd love to see him reprise the role of Lord James Browning Jr., but in the meantime this will do. [Deadline] Meanwhile, Austin Butler, aka Mr. Vanessa Hudgens, has been cast as the main cute boy on the Sex and the City prequel The Carrie Diaries. Butler will play "Sebastian Kydd, a brooding heartthrob and ultimate insider who always plays the outsider. His presence at Carrie’s school will shake things up in a big way." Uh ohhhhh. Watch out! Mr. Little Big is gonna get ya. Also in Carrie Diaries news, James Garner has been cast as the love interest for the young Samantha character. [Deadline] Professional weirdo Jeff Goldblum has been cast on Sarah Silverman's sitcom pilot, playing her ex-boyfriend. Innnnteresting! And kinda weird. But interesting weird. We have high hopes for this show. Sure, it will never be Winning London, but it could still be good. [Vulture]

Odd. Weasely little Scandinavian actor Joel Kinnaman, who glowers dreamily on The Killing and is probably one of the only good things about that rainy mud pile of a show, has been cast as the new RoboCop. Yes, RoboCop. They're bringing it back. It's going to be a Broadway musical whole new franchise! So, good for him? I mean, look what the role did for Peter Weller's career! Anyway, a funny thing in the post about this news is this sentence: "Hollywood is desperately trying to find male stars that studios can build movies around." Ha, oh are they? Finally they've realized they need some male stars for big movies? Up until now it was just women, women, women, running the show. But now there's a new trend. Hollywood is looking for male stars now. Crazy. How things have changed. So, yeah. RoboCop! God we've missed him, haven't we. [Deadline]

Michael Gambon has been made a regular on HBO's Luck, and Margarita Levieva (Revenge) has joined the show as a recurring character. So yay! Two more people to spend their time pretending they have any remote clue what they're saying or what's going on or what anything means. "You gotta turn down the six horse with the shy in the ninth." Or whatever! OK! Whatever you say, Luck. Have fun, Michael and Margarita. Just nod a lot and go with the flow. [Deadline]

Here's a new trailer for the upcoming Men in Black III in which we see a lot more of Josh Brolin doing his Tommy Lee Jones impersonation. It's actually not bad! So, well done on that front, guys. But badly done, no no no, on Will Smith saying "pimp-slapping the shizznit." I know this movie is about time travel, but is it about traveling back to 2002? Because that is the only reason a character should say "pimp-slapping the shizznit" in a movie made in 2012. So... yikes. Bill Hader's Andy Warhol is sort of amusing, though. Sort of. Eh. Why did they make this movie?

And here is a new trailer for HBO's new show Girls. This one shows the more emotional side of the series, what with the music and all. Though, eh. It's still a show about struggling young people in New York City that stars David Mamet's daughter, Brian Williams' daughter, and the daughter of famous artist Laurie Simmons. So it's a show about three young women struggling in New York who have never actually struggled in New York. Feh. Feh to that, we say!

This article is from the archive of our partner The Wire.