1) Casting News: Ken Watanabe has joined the cast of Universal's upcoming fantasy flick Cirque du Freak, along with John C. Reilly as a scheming vampire and Salma Hayek as a bearded lady. The movie is an adaptation of the first book in the children’s series by author Darren Shan. Paul Weitz is directing.

2) Casting News: Tim Meadows and Gillian Vigman have signed on to Fox’s upcoming sci-fi comedy, They Came From Upstairs, about a group of teens in a Maine vacation home battling invading aliens. Meadows will play the local sheriff and Vigman will play the mother of star Ashley Tisdale’s character. John Schultz is directing, based on a screenplay by Mark Burton and Adam F. Goldberg. The movie is due out in early 2009.

3) Casting News: Penelope Cruz has joined the cast of G-Force, a new combination live-action/CG film from producer Jerry Bruckheimer and Disney. The actress will be providing her voice, as will Nicolas Cage, Steve Buscemi and Tracy Morgan, for animated characters in the story about a group of intelligent animal commandoes working for a government agency trying to prevent an evil billionaire from taking over the world. Bill Nighy and Will Arnett also star as human characters in the film, with Hoyt Yeatman directing. The movie is scheduled to hit theaters in spring/summer 2009.  

4) DreamWorks Theatricals and Neal Street Productions are developing a musical play based on the first Shrek movie. The musical will debut in Seattle in the late summer of this year and then move to Broadway in the fall. The musical and Shrek movies are based on characters from William Steig’s book Shrek! The musical features a book and lyrics by David Lindsay-Abaire and music by Jeanine Tesori, and is directed by Jason Moore.

5) Marvel Studios has signed an interim agreement with the Writers Guild of America. They join The Weinstein Company, United Artists, Lionsgate, Worldwide Pants, Spyglass Entertainment, MRC, Jackson Bites, Mandate Films, and Sidney Kimmel Entertainment in arranging separate deals with the striking screenwriters guild, which recently announced renewed talks with the big studios. The deal allows Marvel to proceed with a heavy slate of up-coming projects, including movies about Marvel comic characters Captain America, Thor, Ant-Man, and The Avengers.

6) Sleep Dealer, the futuristic dystopia film directed by Alex Rivera and written by Rivera and David Riker, has snagged two prizes at the Sudance Film Festival: the Waldo Salt Screenwriting Award for outstanding achievement in writing for the screenplay; and the Alfred P. Sloan Prize, given to the filmmaker for an outstanding film focusing on science or technology as a theme or having a scientist, engineer or mathematician as the main character. Sleep Dealer is set in the near future in a militarized world marked by closed borders, an enslaved virtual labor force and a global digital network.