Summit Entertainment, in conjunction with Temple Hill and Taylor Lautner’s father Dan, is producing a star vehicle for the 17-year-old The Twilight Saga: New Moon werewolf.  The film, which Variety describes as “a teen-aged Taken meets Die Hard,” tells the story of an elite soldier-to-be who drops training after he becomes injured and goes off to college instead.  On a spring break trip to Cancun with some friends, however, he’ll have to bust out the combat training when his travel mates are held hostage by a drug cartel kingpin.

The project is the first to be produced under Taylor Made Entertainment, a company Dan Lautner formed to develop film and TV vehicles for his son.  Temple Hill producer Wyck Godfrey says he hopes to start production by June, The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn and Max Steel (a project Lautner’s signed onto at Paramount) permitting.

Darren Lemke, writer of the upcoming Shrek Forever After and Jack the Giant Killer, has a new action-adventure fairytale adaptation in the works: The Nutracker. Yes, based on the ballet. According to Heat Vision, New Line has picked up the project, which is being produced by Marty Bowen and Wyck Godfrey of Temple Hill Entertainment (New Moon, the upcoming adaptation of the popular video game Gears of War).

For those not up on their ballet, The Nutcracker follows a 12-year-old girl who receives a nutcracker doll as a gift from her godfather on Christmas Eve. But as the night wears on, the doll comes to life and becomes involved in a war against a Mouse King with seven heads. This won’t be the first time the story’s been turned into a film, but perhaps the first time on this large a scale. It’s unknown as of now exactly what form the adaptation will take–live action or animated.

During last weekend’s junket for The Twilight Saga: New Moon, I got to speak with Twilight producer Wyck Godfrey for an extended amount of time.  Since we covered not only the Twilight franchise, but some of the other major projects he’s developing, I decided to break the interview up into two parts.   I felt this news was worth a separate article since we talked about D.J. Caruso’s adaptation of the video game Dead Space; developing Len Wiseman’s adaptation of the video game Gears of War; and writer-director Dan Rush’s Everything Must Go starring Will Ferrell.

The big news is Everything Must Go starts filming March 1st and he calls the project Leaving Las Vegas with the humor of Bad Santa!  Also, for fans of Gears of War, he says Wiseman is working on a script and “we’ve done a ton of visual references and he’s sort of put together a whole presentation, so we should know pretty quickly if this version is going to move forward or not.”  What he said about all three projects after the jump:

When you attend a press junket, you never know where and when you’re going to land a scoop.  Sometimes you get a great story during a roundtable interview, and other times you’re sharing an elevator ride with the director of “The Twilight Saga: New Moon” and you ask him about the DVD.  Which is what happened to me today.

On my way to do an interview with producer Wyck Godfrey, I happened to run into director Chris Weitz.  Since I didn’t have a chance to ask a question during the press conference, I used my shared elevator ride to find out what extras would be on the DVD and how many minutes of deleted scenes “Twilight” fans could expect.  While he confirmed the usual stuff like a commentary with Kristen Stewart, Robert Pattinson and Taylor Lautner, the big news is he told me there would be around ten minutes of deleted scenes.  More after the jump:

Academy Award-winning actress Halle Berry is negotiating to star in a new thriller from “Twilight” producers Marty Bowen and Wyck Godfrey.  Titled “Dark Tide”, the film would star Berry as a dive instructor who returns to the sea after a near-fatal incident with a great white shark.  To discuss who is giving Halle Berry career advice these days, hit the jump.