Hollywood seems obsessed with whales and dolphins at the moment, as just in the last 24 hours, fresh news on three different cetacean based movies has surfaced, suggesting cinemas will be full of blowholes and fins next year.
First up, Variety reports that Morgan Freeman, Harry Connick Jr and Ashley Judd are all in talks to star in A Dolphin’s Tale, based on the true story of a young dolphin that loses her tail in a crab trap and an introverted 11-year-old boy who rallies friends and family to save it by persuading a doctor to create a prosthetic attachment to restore the dolphin’s ability to swim. The dolphin at the center of the story, Winter, will play herself in the movie. Freeman is in talks to play the doctor, Connick Jr. would be a marine biologist, while Ashley Judd would play the boy’s mother. Production is due to begin in September, under the direction of Charles Martin Smith.
Another whale based movie in the works is Everybody Loves Whales, which is due to star Drew Barrymore and John Krasinski as a Greenpeace activist and a journalist who in the late 1980s helped alert the world to the plight of three gray whales who became trapped in the artic pack ice and would die if their small opening to the surface froze over. The whales causes a bit of a thaw in the Cold War, with Russia and American working together to help the animals. Now THR reports that Tim Blake Nelson has joined the film as a wildlife expert who works in the wildlife-management office.
Finally, it’s been revealed that Ryan Reynolds will narrate and exec. produce a documentary called, The Whale, about how a baby wild killer whale who became separated from its pod and headed towards a town on Vancouver Island. The whale then tried to make friends with the humans, which, according to Variety, ‘leads to laughter, conflict and unexpected concequences’. Reynolds got involved because he has a personal connection to the story, which took place near to where he grew up.