Check out today’s casting news:

• Andy Garcia (The Untouchables) and Rob Riggle (21 Jump Street) have joined Luke Greenfield’s action-comedy Let’s Be Cops.
• Marton Csokas (The Bourne Supremacy) will star opposite Denzel Washington in Antoine Fuqua’s The Equalizer, also starring Chloe Grace Moretz.
• Jonny Weston (Chasing Mavericks) and Sofia Black-D’Elia (Skins) are in negotiations to join Michael Bay’s found-footage film, Almanac.

Hit the jump for more on each casting announcement.

20th Century Fox has unveiled a teaser trailer for the animated sequel Rio 2, and if you’re a fan of dancing birds, then this clip is for you.  The film finds Anne Hathaway and Jesse Eisenberg reprising their voice roles as Jewel and Blu, with the couple packing up their three kids and leaving the city for a journey into the Amazon.  Naturally, they encounter a host of colorful characters both friendly and villainous, with Andy Garcia, Rita Moreno, Bruno Mars, and Kristin Chenoweth joining the voice cast.  The trailer doesn’t show any of the aforementioned plot at all, but instead focuses on bright colors, samba music, and dancing.

Hit the jump to watch the teaser.  Rio 2 opens in 3D on April 11, 2014.

We’ve got a few casting stories to share this afternoon.  Briefly:

• Jon Hamm will be lending his voice to one of the lead roles opposite Sandra Bullock in Illumination Entertainment’s spinoff Minions.
• Fresh off her turn in Oblivion, actress Olga Kurylenko has joined the cast of director Mark Waters’ (Mean Girls) YA adaptation Vampire Academy: Blood Sisters.
• Andy Garcia and Ray Romano are joining the cast of the crime drama Rob the Mob.

Hit the jump for more details.

Twentieth Century Fox has announced their full voice cast list for Rio 2, the sequel to writer/director Carlos Saldanha’s 2011 film.  Saldanha returns for the sequel, as do Anne Hathaway, Jesse Eisenberg, Jamie Foxx and wil.i.am, who will each reprise their roles as the Brazilian birds, along with Rodrigo Santoro who will once again be voicing Tulio.  New additions to the cast include Andy Garcia, Kristin Chenoweth, singer Bruno Mars, NBC Today Show news anchor and South American native, Natalie Morales and Grammy-winner Janelle Monáe, who will provide original music for the film and also voice a character.  Heat Vision also reports that Rio 2 will incorporate Rio’s 2014 FIFA World Cup into its plot.  The animated sequel opens April 14, 2014.

A momentous occasion happened last night on late night television: Matt Damon finally reached a breaking point and hijacked Jimmy Kimmel Live.  Damon has been the brunt of a long-running joke on the show in which Kimmel ends each night’s broadcast by apologizing for bumping Matt Damon when they run out of time.  Damon has appeared in a few sketches here and there that tie-in with the gag, but fresh off Kimmel’s timeslot change that puts him up against Letterman and Leno, Damon hosted the entire show last night as he had “kidnapped” Kimmel.

It was a hilariously fun 90 minutes, as Damon must have picked up the phone and called all his closest friends since the broadcast was filled with the likes of Ben Affleck, Gary Oldman, Nicole Kidman, Robin Williams, Reese Witherspoon, Andy Garcia, Amy Adams, Sheryl Crow, Demi Moore, and plenty others.  Hit the jumps to watch a few highlights from the show.

Andy Garcia’s directorial project about the relationship between author Ernest Hemingway and fishing boat captain Gregorio Fuentes has been in development since 2009, but financing has now finally been secured.  THR reports that Hemingway & Fuentes is a go with Anthony Hopkins, Annette Bening, and Garcia all set to star.  Hopkins plays Hemingway while Garcia is set as Fuentes, and the film follows the relationship that eventually inspired Hemingway’s literary classic The Old Man and the Sea.  Garcia wrote the script alongside Hemingway’s granddaughter, Hilary Hemingway

Production on Hemingway & Fuentes is scheduled to begin in January 2013, with Bening poised to play the author’s third wife, Mary Welsh Hemingway.  Actor Corey Stoll’s Hemingway in Midnight in Paris is gonna be a tough performance to beat, but if anyone can do it it’s Hopkins. The actor is currently playing the legendary filmmaker Alfred Hitchcock in Hitchcock, which centers on the director’s troubled production of Psycho.

More casting news to report today, this time from two similarly titled features.  You might also want to check out the casting updates on Colin Farrell, Willem Dafoe and Rooney Mara. Check out the Admission/Admissions casting below:

• Vera Farmiga and Andy Garcia will team up for the indie romantic comedy, Admissions, in which they strike up a spontaneous romance when they meet while taking their children to tour the same college.
• Michael Sheen will join Tina Fey and Paul Rudd in the similarly titled/themed Admission, featuring Fey as an unmarried college admissions counselor who falls for an old flame (Rudd).

Hit the jump for more details (and clarification) on each project.

A number of actors are set to star in the action thriller The Truth. Andy Garcia, Forest Whitaker, and Eva Longoria are poised to star in the pic, written and directed by Damian Lee (King of Sorrow). The story centers on an ex-CIA operative (Garcia) who is now working as a political talk show host. He’s approached by a corporate whistle blower to “expose her company’s cover-up of a massacre in a South American village.” Deadline reports that the cast also includes Kim Coates, Deborah Kara Unger, Kevin Durand, Devon Bostick, Lara Daans, and Steven Bauer. Garcia, Coates, and Jeff Sackman are executive producers on the project. Production begins later this month in Ontario and Puerto Rico. Whitaker is currently filming the actioner The Last Stand alongside Arnold Schwarzenegger.

Andy Garcia, Eva Longoria Parker, Catalina Sandino Moreno (Maria Full of Grace), Peter O’ Toole, and Bruce Greenwood (Star Trek) will star in the Mexican historical epic Cristiada.  Variety reports that the film centers on the 1926-1929 Cristero War, “touched off by a rebellion over the Mexican government’s 1917 attempt to remove the influence of the Catholic Church and secularize the country.”  Chronicles of Narnia visual FX supervisor Dean Wright will direct the film from a script he wrote with Michael James Love.  The film also stars Oscar Isaac (Robin Hood) and Nestor Carbonell (Lost).

With the short film anthology “New York, I Love You” (a sort of sequel to “Paris, je t’aime”) set for release October 16^th, Vivendi Entertainment has released a ton of clips and I’ve posted all of them after the jump. While most film’s get four to eight clips released for promotional purposes, due to how large the cast is and how each person needs a clip when promoting the movie on a talk show, the studio has released a whopping 16 clips and it’s about sixteen minutes of the movie. So if you’ve been waiting for the film, you can see a lot of it right now. If you’re not familiar with “New York, I Love You”, the film’s got a huge cast and eleven directors telling stories about New York City and love. Take a look:

The first trailer for Vivendi Entertainment’s “New York, I Love You” has been released. This is the film that’s like “Paris, je t’aime”, but while that one had no connective tissue, somehow “New York, I Love You” ties most or all of the short films together.

While a feature film made up of a lot of short films might not appeal to all of you, the cast is ridiculous and it’s something I can’t wait to see. If you’re curious, watch the trailer after the jump. I’ve also included all the director’s involved and the full cast:

The first poster has been released for “New York, I Love You”. This is the anthology film that features many short films about love in the city that never sleeps. While many of you might not be excited about a feature film that’s made up of only shorts, take a look at this cast:

Bradley Cooper, Justin Bartha, Andy Garcia, Hayden Christensen, Rachel Bilson, Natalie Portman, Irrfan Khan, Emilie Ohana, Orlando Bloom, Christina Ricci, Maggie Q, Ethan Hawke, Anton Yelchin, James Caan, Olivia Thirlby, Blake Lively, Drea De Matteo, Julie Christie, John Hurt, Shia LaBeouf, Ugur Yucel, Taylor Geare, Carlos Acosta, Jacinda Barrett, Shu Qi, Burt Young, Chris Cooper, Robin Wright Penn, Eva Amurri, Eli Wallach, and Cloris Leachman

I think you just got interested. Anyway, after the jump is the poster, the synopsis, and all the directors who contributed to the project. “New York, I Love You” gets released October 16^th.