Christopher Nolan shot 28 minutes of The Dark Knight with IMAX cameras.  He followed with 72 minutes of IMAX footage for The Dark Knight Rises.  We learned with the release date announcement that his next project, Interstellar, is destined for IMAX.  At CinemaCon tonight, Greg Foster, Chairman and President of IMAX Entertainment, revealed Nolan will shoot a significant portion of Interstellar with IMAX cameras.  I imagine Nolan wants to test the limits of the technology and film as much of this “heroic interstellar voyage to the furthest reaches of our scientific understanding” as possible in his ideal format.  We will see if he can push it to 100 minutes or more this time around and—fingers crossed—shoot an entire feature film in IMAX in the near future.

In addition, IMAX announced Michael Bay will shoot selected scenes in Transformers 4 in IMAX.  This is all part of Paramount’s five-picture deal with IMAX—the three remaining titles have yet to be announced.  Hit the jump for the press release with the details.

Back in 2010, Zero Dark Thirty director Kathryn Bigelow and screenwriter Mark Boal were coming off their Oscar wins for The Hurt Locker, and turning their attention to the crime drama Triple Frontier (also known as Sleeping Dogs).  The details of the plot were unknown, but the film was billed as an action-adventure set in a border zone of South America known as “la triple frontera”, a haven for organized crime.  Tom Hanks was attached to play one of the leads, and other stars were rumored for the picture including Johnny Depp, Sean Penn, Denzel Washington, and Javier Bardem.  The plan was to start filming in March 2011.  But then Bigelow and Boal decided to hit pause, and do an indie thriller before Triple Frontier.  It’s worth noting that Variety shot down a rumor that “the plot concerns the hunt for Osama Bin Laden,” even though that rumor ultimately turned out to be true.  However, at that time the indie thriller was about losing Bin Laden in the Tora Bora Mountains; once he was killed, the script had to be updated.

So what happened with Triple Frontier?  Hit the jump for more.

Three of Tinsel Town’s brightest stars are about to secure the dough to make their next motion pictures*:

• Sony Pictures and 20th Century Fox will team up to finance and distribute George Clooney‘s WWII-era art heist drama Monuments Men.
• Paramount Pictures closed a deal to acquire the T.S. Nowlin script Our Name Is Adam, with Tom Cruise attached to star as an astronaut who travels back in time and works with his younger self.
• Paramount is also eying Adam Sandler’s next comedy, an untitled project that Sandler will shoot after Grown Ups 2. [Update: Hit the jump for the title and info on Sandler's upcoming comedy.]

More on each project—including some surprise Bill Murray goodness—after the jump.

Just a day after reporting that Tom Cruise was circling the T.S. Nowlin sci-fi spec script, Our Name is Adam, Paramount appears to be in exclusive negotiations for the property.  Sure to fetch a high price tag, the project could likely be another win for the studio and Cruise, who currently collaborate on the Mission: Impossible franchise and the upcoming film, Jack Reacher.  Another recent winner for Paramount was the acquisition of Martin Scorsese’s The Wolf of Wall Street starring Leonardo DiCaprio.  The studio plans to release the film in late 2013 to qualify for the awards season.  But where there are winners, there must be losers.  Hit the jump to read up on the status of Paramount’s Draft Day, starring Kevin Costner and directed by Ivan Reitman. 

You now have a rough date to mark on your calendar for the return of Jack Ryan, in the movie tentatively titled (you’ll never guess) Jack Ryan.  Deadline reports Paramount has scheduled the reboot for the fourth quarter of 2013, with the hope of kicking off a Jack Ryan trilogy led by Chris Pine, not to mention a spinoff that may star Tom Hardy as fellow spy John Clark.  Kenneth Branagh will direct Jack Ryan and play the villain.  Keira Knightley is the female lead, Jack’s wife Cathy.  Kevin Costner recently accepted the role as the CIA liason to Jack Ryan and John Clark, which puts Costner in both Jack Ryan and the Clark-centric spinoff Without Remorse, and may even headline his own movie in due time.

But for now, let’s focus on Jack Ryan.  Hit the jump for story details.

Adam McKay‘s feature directing career has always been for Will Ferrell comedies, but for the past several years, McKay has had his eye on adapting Garth Ennis and Darick Robertson‘s comic book series, The Boys.  The comic centers on a group of special agents who are tasked with policing the world’s superheroes and villains by any means necessary.  McKay wanted to make a $100 million hard-R anti-superhero movie, and that pitch tends to make studio executives choke, especially when the property isn’t already established with mainstream audiences.  Earlier this year, Columbia passed on The Boys, which was disappointing but not too surprising.

Paramount was involved in two property acquisitions with high-profile producers today:

• Paramount teamed with J.J. Abrams‘ Bad Robot to option the nazi hunter spec script Wunderkind, written by Patrick Aison.
• The studio acquired the screen rights to Libba Bray‘s upcoming novel The Diviners.  Josh Schwartz and Stephanie Savage will produce through their Fake Empire banner.

Hit the jump for details on both projects.

Before you even say it, “Yes, they’ll turn anything into a movie.”  Variety reports that Paramount is in talks with Seinfeld writers Alec Berg and David Mandel to develop a movie based off Andrew Grantham‘s YouTube hit “Ultimate Dog Tease”.  In the video, an owner taunts his dog with promises of food only to reveal that he has already eaten the meal.  If that sound stupid and unfunny, that’s because it is.  But it also racked up 93 million pageviews, so here we are.  Paramount will develop the movie through its low-budget label, Insurge, which recently produced The Devil Inside.

In case your parents haven’t already forwarded it to you, hit the jump to check out the video.

Paramount and Bad Robot are teaming up once more for an untitled action pic, and they’ve settled on Brad Parker to take the helm. Variety reports that the Diary of Lawson Oxford director has been set to head up the untitled action pic which has J.J. Abrams, Matt Reeves, and Bryan Burk onboard to produce. Plot details are under wraps, but Michael Gilio (Carter Beats the Devil) wrote the script. Parker made his feature directorial debut with the The Diary of Lawson Oxford, a horror film produced by Paranormal Activity helmer Oren Peli. The pic stars Jesse McCartney and is due out sometime next year.

Parker has a rapport with Reeves, as he served as second-unit director on the remake Let Me In. He began a successful career directing commercials in the 1990s, working on spots for Nike, Nintendo, and Sony. Bad Robot most recently produced the super-successful Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol, and is gearing up for production start on Abrams’ sequel to Star Trek.

Despite lacking an official script, director, or cast, Paranormal Activity 4 is set to open in theaters a mere nine months from now. We first learned that Paramount was planning to release a new entry in the ever-popular franchise this year a few days ago, and today the studio is quick to announce that an official release date has been set for October 19th (per THR). The quick turnaround shouldn’t be a problem for the studio though, as last October’s Paranormal Activity 3 was made for just $5 million and didn’t begin production until June. The series is quickly becoming the new Saw, and Paramount is surely very happy with the small budget/big box office model that’s been working so far.

On the 19th the pic will go up against the star-studded period crime thriller Gangster Squad (Sean Penn, Josh Brolin, and Ryan Gosling) and the similarly star-studded romantic comedy The Big Wedding (Robert De Niro, Susan Sarandon, Diane Keaton, Katherine Heigel, and Robin Williams). The following weekend PA4 will face some horror competition from Halloween 3D, while The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 3D opens earlier that month.

I love studio logos.  After the lights go down and the crowd goes silent, the logo is the first official sign the movie experience is about to begin.  I have an especially strong connection with the Paramount logo.  Whenever those stars swoop in and encircle the picturesque mountain, I hear the opening theme of The Godfather.  I can’t find the video, but those iconic horns sound right as the first star settles in at the side of the mountain.  So I am excited that Paramount is celebrating their 100th anniversary by an updating the logo.  It is mostly the same, but somehow even more picturesque, if you can imagine that.

The logo will first be seen on the December 16 IMAX release of Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol.  Hit the jump to see the new logo in full, plus a look at how the logo has evolved over the years.

Well that didn’t take long at all. Surrounding the release of Tranformers: Dark of the Moon was Michael Bay’s assurance that after helming all three flicks in the trilogy, he was done with the franchise. Cut to Dark of the Moon making a kajillion dollars for Paramount, and rumors began swirling that Bay might come back. The director denied any involvement and maintained that he was focused on making his “smaller” movie Pain and Gain. Just yesterday we reported that Bay is in talks with Dwayne Johnson to star in the $20 million dark comedy, and Bay seemed on track to move away from the robot series. Cut to today and now comes word that Bay will indeed be returning for the fourth Transformers film. Hit the jump for more.

[Update: Bay has commented on this report.  Hit the jump for what he had to say.]

As J.J. Abrams winds down his Super 8 duties with the film’s Blu-ray release this week, the sequel to his 2009 smash hit Star Trek is moving full-steam ahead. While it’s taken a couple years to get going and Abrams only just recently officially signed on as director, Captain Kirk and crew are absolutely 100% coming back with a firm release date of May 17th, 2013 set. However, the release date is just the tip of the iceberg as we now have confirmation that we’ll be following the crew in 3D this time around. Hit the jump for more.

Paramount and J.J. Abrams’ Bad Robot have settled on a couple of screenwriters to pen their adaptation of the graphic novel-picture book Boilerplate: History’s Mechanical Marvel. Deadline reports that JD Payne and Patrick McKay will handle scripting duties for the pic, which takes place in the late 19th and early 20th century and tells the story of the world’s first robot who “fought alongside Terry Roosevelt and Lawrence of Arabia, journeyed to the South Pole and was involved in the silent movie business before disappearing on the battlefields of World War I.” The idea for the story is fantastic, and hopefully Abrams and Co. can pull off an equally fascinating feature film.

Payne and McKay have yet to have one of their scripts produced, but they wrote the Goliath pic that Relativity is developing (and may or may not star Dwayne Johnson and Taylor Lautner), and are also penning a feature film adaptation of the Spike TV series Deadliest Warrior. Hit the jump to read a synopsis for the graphic novel.

A sci-fi action project by director John Heffernan may not have a title yet, but it does have a writer. Variety reports that John Glenn, the writer behind Eagle Eye, has been tapped to re-write the script. The project, previously known as Abducted, was picked up by Paramount in June of this year and is set up through Mary Parent’s Disruption Entertainment. Parent and Cale Boyter are producing the pic, pitched as “Die Hard on an alien spaceship.”

Brett Ratner’s next directorial project has itself a writer and a title. Ann Peacock (The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe) has been tapped to write Hunting Eichmann, an international thriller based on true accounts. Deadline reports that the project follows Israeli agents in their journey to Argentina to capture Adolph Eichmann, one of the major Nazi organizers behind the Holocaust. Ratner and Anthony Bregman (Our Idiot Brother) will produce for Cathy Schulman at Mandalay Pictures.