Screen Gems and Lakeshore Entertainment have signed Michael Ealy (Takers) and his beautiful eyes to play the male lead opposite franchise star Kate Beckinsale in Underworld 4: New Dawn.  In the script by J. Michael Straczynski (Ninja Assassin) and John Hlavin (The Shield), vampiress Selene (Beckinsale) wakes from a coma-like state after fifteen years to learn she has a 14-year-old vampire/Lycan hybrid daughter: "they must stop BioCom from creating super Lycans that will kill them all.”  Ealy plays a police detective who first hunts Beckinsale, then teams up with her.  Underworld 3D just started shooting in Vancouver under the direction of Swedish team Mans Marlind and Bjorn Stein (Shelter); the film is scheduled for release on January 20, 2012.Hit the jump for news on the true nature of Robin McLeavy's involvement with Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter, plus details on the indie thriller A Single Shot.We first saw McLeavy (The Loved Ones) tagged to play Mary Todd Lincoln in the horror revisionist tale before that role wound up in the arms of Mary Elizabeth Winstead .  Instead, McLeavy will play Honest Abe's mother Nancy Hanks Lincoln.  Deadline says the role is brief but "sets the tone for the action"; Nancy is killed by a zombie, which pushes young Abraham (Benjamin Walker) into a vendetta against "the growing scourge of vampires in the 1800s."  Anthony Mackie and Dominic Cooper also star.  Timur Bekmambetov is directing; Tim Burton will produce.  Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter opens on June 22, 2012.Seth Grahame-Smith wrote the script based on his own novel.  Here's the synopsis:

Indiana, 1818. Moonlight falls through the dense woods that surround a one-room cabin, where a nine-year-old Abraham Lincoln kneels at his suffering mother’s bedside. She’s been stricken with something the old-timers call “Milk Sickness.”

“My baby boy…” she whispers before dying.

Only later will the grieving Abe learn that his mother’s fatal affliction was actually the work of a vampire.

When the truth becomes known to young Lincoln, he writes in his journal, “henceforth my life shall be one of rigorous study and devotion. I shall become a master of mind and body. And this mastery shall have but one purpose…” Gifted with his legendary height, strength, and skill with an ax, Abe sets out on a path of vengeance that will lead him all the way to the White House. [Amazon]

Finally, Alessandro Nivola (Howl) has signed on to star and produce the indie thriller A Single Shot.  Matthew F. Jones adapted the screenplay from his own novel about "what happens in  a farming community in the rural Adirondack mountains after John Moon (Nivola) accidentally shoots a teenage girl while aiming at a deer he's illegally poaching in a nature preserve."  Emily Mortimer, William H. Macy, Terrence Howard, Juliette Lewis, James Badge Dale and Juno Temple.

Here's the full synopsis for Jones' novel:

John Moon lives alone in a trailer on the land that was his family's farm until the bank foreclosed on it years ago (for reasons he has never fully understood). His wife has just left him, taking their infant son with her, and John must support himself with odd jobs and poaching game on a neighbor's land. Out hunting deer one morning, he hears the rustle of branches and fires a single shot--only to discover that he has killed a teenage girl.

Horrified, Moon tries to cover up his tragic mistake and then to find out who the girl was and what she was doing in the woods. Fear, guilt, and obsession leads him to unearth a shocking pattern of evil involving the residents of the town--and before long all the plots have converged on him. [Amazon]