For quite a while it seemed like everything was sorted for Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. David O’Russell would direct and Natalie Portman would star. However in recent weeks it’s been reported that Portman has stepped away, and that due to scheduling conflicts, O’Russell decided to make Old St. Louis instead.
However Deadline has some interesting info, suggesting that before O’Russell said goodbye, he’d already managed to line up Scarlett Johansson to replace Portman as Elizabeth Bennet, with Bradley Cooper interested in being Mr. Darcy (the novel the film is based on, by Seth Grahame-Smith, takes Austen’s prose and adds in a deadly zombie outbreak). However with no director, the casting is currently in limbo (Lionsgate suggests other actors are being looked at too), but it would seem those two are still potential candidates to put on their period frocks and kick undead ass.
The first job though it to find a replacement helmer, and while nobody has been signed up yet, the suggestion is that Price Of Persia’s Mike Newell is the current front-runner, with Neill Marshall’s name also being bandied about.