Variety reports that Timothy Olyphant has signed for the comedy heist film, High Life. Based on the play by Lee MacDougall, the story centers on four hapless criminals in a heist gone wrong. The play premiered in Toronto in 1996 and went on to win a DORA award. Olyphant will star as their leader who is ultimately brought down by his incompetent partners. In the original play, the four friends were hopeless morphine addicts, but I'm going to take a guess and say that the new script might gloss over that particular element -- but it will all depend on just how dark this comedy wants to get.

Gary Yates has already been signed to direct, and also co-wrote the script with MacDougall. Yates is French-Canadian by birth and most of his credits are in Canadian television -- although he has already written and directed his one heist film titled Seven Ways Lucky, so the experience might come in handy. MacDougall is an actor as well as a playwright, but considering his biggest credit to date is in Cheaper by the Dozen 2, he might be better off sticking to writing.

Joining Olyphant in his band of fun-loving criminals are Joe Anderson (Across the Universe), Stephen Eric McIntyre (The Lookout) and Rossif Sutherland (Poor Boy's Game). With Hitman due for release in the coming weeks, in between re-shoots for the video game adaptation (you can also read Cinematical's interview with Olyphant about some of those Hitman rumors here), Olyphant has already finished work on the Iraq war drama Stop-Loss with Ryan Philippe. Then it's off to do some video game voice-over work for Turok. Plus, High Life has already begun production, so it doesn't look like Olyphant is going to have any down time in the near future.

I have to admit, the closer we get to the big-screen version of Hitman, the worse it is starting to look. A new international poster for the best-selling Eidos adaptation has just been released (click on the image for a larger version), and even if I put my personal opinion aside, it's still a pretty tacky-looking poster. Granted, I wasn't the biggest fan of a majority of the poster art that has come out of the project, with the exception of the French one, but it's possible that this one is the ugliest in the bunch so far. Starring Timothy Olyphant (Catch and Release) as the unstoppable Agent 47, the story centers on a political conspiracy with a damsel in distress. All the while, our hero tries to uncover his past. The adaptation was written by Skip Woods, and when you consider what happened to his other projects, it's not a stretch to say that the guy seems to be working under a curse lately.

Bad news for Hitman fans started to pile up back in August. First, 20th Century Fox announced that the film's release date was being pushed back, and then there were rumors that director Xavier Gens was being pulled from the project. Talk of the film going for a PG-13 rating seemed like a recipe for disaster -- for goodness sake the movie is called Hitman, what exactly was he supposed to do for two hours? Tend to his tomato plants? Luckily it all turned out be idle gossip and Fox confirmed that Gens was still attached to the project and that the film would be maintaining what they call, "a hard R'. Hitman will arrive in theaters on November 21st.

Yeah, I'm not happy about it either. Earlier today, I got a call from Ian McShane to talk about his new family fantasy movie, The Dark is Rising, and I asked him the big question Deadwood fans have been wanting to know for a while now -- was HBO just blowing smoke with its promise to wrap up the series with a couple of made-for-TV movies? Well, the answer is yes, McShane revealed to us. "I just got a call on Friday from ... a dear friend of mine, who told me that they're packing up the ranch," McShane said. "They're dismantling the ranch and taking the stuff out. That ship is gonna sail. Bonsoir, Deadwood." He went on to say that even if the movies were happening, there would be the strike to consider, and on top of that, he's committed to a filming schedule that would prevent him from doing them anytime before late next year anyway.

I told McShane that as a fan, I felt completely cheated by this move on HBO's part. "You feel cheated? Imagine how I feel!" he replied. "We all do. We all do. It was one of those one-off jobs that you do which has got an extraordinary creative brain behind it, and it kept getting better, and the actors were great. It was a fabulous place to be and work. It was a workshop cum theater cum film. It was an extraordinary time. But everything has to come to an end, babe." So, there you have it.