I don’t know if anyone has ever called Dwayne Johnson “just a big teddy bear” and lived to tell the tale, but he might get the chance to play one in a New Line picture tentatively titled Teddy Bear.  Details of the picture are being kept under wraps, but the source material was an illustration by fantasy artist Alex Panagopoulos.  The drawing, titled “Sweet Halloween Dreams” depicts a tiny stuffed teddy bear with a wooden sword and shield defending a sleeping child from an enormous monster.  Johnson is attached to produce at the moment with the possibility of starring.  Hit the jump for more.

I guess it was only a matter of time. With Hollywood craving anything and everything 3D, the market seems ripe for a disaster film resurgence. What better way to kick off a string of 3D disaster pics than with earthquakes? New Line Cinema is leading the charge with the aptly named San Andreas: 3D. 24 Frames reports that versatile scribe Allan Loeb (Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps, 21) wrote the script, which centers on a man “forced to go on the road to reconcile with his children and his estranged wife, who’s moved away and taken up with another man.” The film follows the protagonist’s journey from Los Angeles to San Francisco.

Beau Flynn (Journey to the Center of the Earth 3D) is producing, and the project is currently seeking a director. With movies like this, the best you can really hope for is big spectacle (Michael Bay could sure have some fun with earthquakes in 3D). Roland Emmerich took a stab at monstrous quakes with 2012 pretty effectively, so we’ll have to see if the director they go with can come up with a cool take on the disaster genre. Either way, 3D earthquakes are coming soon to a theater near you.

Perhaps impressed by the critical and financial success of his first blockbuster lead, Thor, Sony Pictures has tapped Chris Hemsworth to star in their recently acquired actioner, Shadow Runner. According to Deadline, the studio picked up the pitch for the action/thriller which is based on an idea from Drive scribe Hossein Amini who will executive produce. Beau Flynn, Tripp Vinson, and Will Ward will co-produce the pic which is believed to require Hemsworth to “lead an elite team of operatives who take on impossible tasks.” Let’s hope they only seem impossible, or else moviegoers could be in for a frustrating 90 minutes.

Per the report, Amini’s original idea is inspired by a real-life event in which a 17-member team of Israeli assassins tracked and dispatched of a Hamas leader in the lobby of a five-star Dubai hotel. However, the film is not expected to mirror that event verbatim. In addition to Shadow Runner, Hemsworth also has a lead spot alongside Kristen Stewart and Charlize Theron in Snow White and the Huntsman which is scheduled to hit theaters on June 1, 2012. The Thor star is currently filming The Avengers and will hopefully see his turns in the MGM back-logged films Red Dawn and Cabin in the Woods on the silver screen in the near future.

According to Variety, Mark Pellington (Henry Poole Is Here, The Mothman Prophecies) is set to helm the remake of Juan Antonio Bayona’s ghost story, The Orphanage.  Guillermo Del Toro, who produced the original, is also on board to produce the remake along with ContraFilm toppers Beau Flynn and Tripp Vinson attached to produce.  Pellington will direct from a script written by Larry Fessenden (The Last Winter) and Del Toro.

As described by Variety, “The original Orphanage stars Belen Rueda (“The Sea Inside”) as a woman who takes over the orphanage where she was raised, to open a home for disabled children. Then her young son begins to play with the same imaginary friend who terrorized her when she was a child.”