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Mind Your Own Business, RDJ: Robert Downey Jr. is in negotiations to voice a character in DreamWorks Animation's Master Mind, produced by Ben Stiller's Red Hour films. Tina Fey is also in discussions to join the movie, the story of a supervillain who loses his will to live after he accidentally kills his arch nemesis. With no one alive to feud with, he looks in the mirror and thinks, "My God, this is what it's like every day for Gore Vidal." [Hollywood Insider/EW]

Phelps Comes Alive: Winning gold medals in the 200 IM, the 4 x 100 free relay, the shot put, the steeplechase, and women's basketball wasn't enough for Michael Phelps; now he's set his sights on Saturday Night Live, which America's Hottest Buthisface will host in the show's season premiere on September 13. Expect Phelps to appear in — and win — every sketch. [Variety]

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Mambo No. 5: Warner Bros. is co-producing Coco Before Chanel, a Coco Chanel biopic based on Edmonde Charles-Roux's biography L'irreguliere. As it’s a French co-production, Audrey Tautou seems to be starring almost by default, and fashion colossus Karl Lagerfeld will re-create the designer's attire. You can be sure Chinese bootleggers are already gearing up to sell pirated DVDs bundled with Chanel sunglasses for only 75 cents. [HR]

Swank's Up to Something: Hilary Swank's production company has picked up the rights to Emily Griffin's novel Something Borrowed as a potential starring vehicle for the million-dollar baby. Story follows a Manhattan lawyer who gets romantically entangled with her best friend's fiancé, which is totally hilarious because she's borrowing him! But seriously, the deal also includes the rights to Giffin's sequel, Something Blue, so we can only hope that Clint Eastwood euthanizes Swank before these movies get made. [Variety]

Columbia Hot for Teacher: Columbia has picked up Bad Teacher from The Office producers Lee Eisenberg and Gene Stupnitsky. Comedy follows a trash-talking, annoying seventh-grade teacher who's dumped by her sugar-daddy boyfriend and turns her flirtatious interests toward a fellow teacher, only to find a romantic rival for his affection: the school's model teacher. Can someone please start an Internet campaign to make this a starring vehicle for Mindy Kaling? Hey, you guys made magic happen for Jon Favreau. [Variety]

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Cher's Meow Mix: Oscar winner Cher may trace the paw prints of Catwoman in Christopher Nolan's third Batman movie, The Caped Crusader, joining Johnny Depp (The Riddler) and Christian Bale (Raspy-Voice Batman). According to a WB studio exec, Nolan wants to "portray her like a vamp in her twilight years," which, please Lord, means Catwoman will say she's getting too old for this catshit. Or they may have made all this up. [Telegraph]

Harrelson's Goin' to Zombieland: Peer pressure's finally gotten the best of our friend Woody Harrelson, as he joins one of like twenty zombie movies coming out next year, Columbia's Zombieland. Story, by Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick (The Joe Schmo Show), revolves around a "mismatched pair of survivors who find friendship and redemption in a world overrun by zombies." Unless it's actually set at Disneyland with zombie Disney characters, this one might have trouble finding an audience in 2009's overcrowded zombie-movie marketplace. [HR]

Photo-illustration: Getty Images

Liukin Chalks It Up: The end of the Olympics made us worried we might never again see charming but unpleasantly named U.S. gold medalist Nastia Liukin. We'd weep openly, but producer Jasper Jan has tapped the flexible cutie to star in Chalk It Up alongside "comedian" Mario Cantone. In other words, it's going straight to DVD. As August, National Slow News Day Month, groans to a close, this is what passes for news. [Film School Rejects]
Update: Liukin's publicist emails, "Her agent received a call and they sent him a script, that is it."

Ken and Barbie, Toys: Jodi Benson, the voice of The Little Mermaid's Ariel, revealed to IESB that she's voicing the part of a Barbie doll in Pixar's Toy Story 3. Ken will also figure into the story, voiced by none other than Michael Keaton. Speculation abounds among tween girls about whether he'll have plastic junk or plastic underpants that don't come off. [IESB]

For Whom the Bell Tolls: In other animated news, nerd bait Kristen Bell will voice the lead girl character in Warner Bros.' CG feature adaptation of Astro Boy, the coming-of-age story about a robot boy with rocket feet who fights tons of dudes so his dad will love him. In the meantime, barring any more Harvey Weinstein release-date whims, it looks like you might actually get to see Bell in September's Fanboys. [Variety]

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J.C.V.D.!!!: Peace Arch has acquired the North American rights to Jean-Claude Van Damme's action-comedy, J.C.V.D., the most refreshing action movie we've seen in a long time (and the best movie of the year? Maybe!). Story follows the actual actor Jean-Claude Van Damme, struggling with debts and the ghost of celebrity, until he gets caught up in a real-life bank robbery and must become the action hero he's played so ridiculously in the past. [Variety]

Three Join LAPD: 24's Regina King, Shark's Kevin Alejandro, and Daybreak's Michael McGrady have been cast in LAPD, NBC's pilot about — sigh — officers on the LAPD who, you know, do cop stuff or whatever … in L.A. The real question is why not LAPD Blue? Call us old-fashioned, but we like our cop show acronyms to be followed by a color. [HR]

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Extraction Imminent: Ben Affleck is in final negotiations to star in Mike Judge's Extract, the story of a factory owner (Jason Bateman) with workplace troubles and a cheating wife. Affleck will play an ambulance-chasing lawyer, and Clifton Collins Jr. joins him as a factory worker who gets injured and wins a huge settlement. We don't want to "jump to conclusions," but didn't this subplot already happen in Office Space? Not that we'd mind watching Office Space again. [Variety]

Blackbird Sings in Dead of Night: David Harrower will adapt his awesome play Blackbird into a feature for Jean Doumanian Productions. Blackbird, which ran Off Broadway with Jeff Daniels and Alison Pill, follows a woman in her twenties who shows up in an older man's office, years after they had an underage affair that he tried to hide by moving and changing his name to something other than R. Kelly. [Variety]

Domingo Returns to Adriana: Placido Domingo will return to sing the role in which he debuted at the Met 40 years ago, replacing Marcelo Álvarez as Maurizio in Adriana Lecouvreur. In February, he'll sing the role for the first time since 1983, and the last time until his head in a jar performs at the SpaceMet in 2158. [NYT]

Photo-illustration: Getty Images; New Line

Fassbender, You Crazy Bastard!: Michael Fassbender is in final negotiations to join Quentin Tarantino's Inglorious Bastards as Lieutenant Archie Hicox, the part Simon Pegg had to dump owing to "insurmountable scheduling difficulties." Fassbender's been getting buzz since Cannes because of his turn as Bobby Sands in Hunger, where he basically starved himself for the role. We hope for this role he knows not to kill any real Germans. [Variety]

Tragedy Strikes McAvoy and Blunt: James McAvoy and Emily Blunt are in negotiations to play starcross'd CGI garden gnome lovers in Miramax's Gnomeo and Juliet. Producer Elton John initially brought the animated feature to Disney, but John Lasseter, no dummy he, immediately axed the project when he came over with Pixar. But like any good demon spawn from hell, this idea just won't stay dead. Timmy the orphan asks, "Vulture? If God loves us, why would He let this movie get made?" We don't know, Timmy. We. Just. Don't. Know. [HR]

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Crowe at the Improv: In what will surely make Bill Hicks's zombie corpse rise up from hell in black-hearted rage, Russell Crowe has revealed that he has a "project based on the life of [the late] comedian Bill Hicks, which is going from treatment to draft stage with Kiwi writer Mark Staufer." True, Hicks and Crowe both seem to have had an affinity for alcohol and picking fights with strangers, but Hicks might agree that a commercial biopic comes pretty close to "suckin' Satan's pecker." [SMH via Comingsoon]

Cruise Feeling Sleepy: Tom Cruise and Sam Raimi have set up Sleeper at Warner Bros., with Cruise "loosely attached to star" in the DC Comics adaptation about a spy who's impervious to pain because his body has fused with an alien artifact. Then the spy goes on to infiltrate a villainous organization and falls in love with a key member named Miss Misery. Um, Robert Downey Jr., any thoughts on this dazzling entry in the DC canon? HR]

The Coen Brothers Get Serious: Tony-nominated Michael Stuhlbarg (The Pillowman) will play a professor whose life unravels when his brother won't move out of the house in Joel and Ethan Coen's A Serious Man. Don't worry about opening weekend; Spin City's Richard Kind is playing the brother, lending some much-needed star power to the picture. [Variety]

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…On the Other Hand: First of all, David Krumholtz is out. But don't despair, because Freaks and Geeks' Neal Schweiber, or "Samm Levine" if you're into real names, has landed a part among Brad Pitt's merry band of Nazi killers in Inglorious Bastards. We hope he gets to do ventriloquism and quote Bill Murray as much as possible. [Ain't It Cool News]

Two Get Goosebumps: Larry Karaszewski and Scott Alexander are in negotiations to write the big-screen adaptation of R.L. Stine's Goosebumps series. Producer Neal Moritz hinted they'll probably cast kids for the leads and bring in well-known actors for supporting roles like in the Harry Potter movies, and then … a ghostly hand grabbed his neck! [Chapter break] But it was just his sister, Marcy Moritz. [HR]

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Carell and Fey to Date: Steve Carell and Tina Fey will star as a married couple in Date Night, directed by Night at the Museum's Shawn Levy for Fox. Story follows a couple who find their routine date night "becomes much more than just dinner and a movie," which is a just coy way of saying "high jinks ensue," which itself is just a coy way of saying "At some point they will be kidnapped and lashed to a tree while itchy bears advance." [Variety]

Baldwin Feeling the Romance: In other 30 Rockish news, Alec Baldwin, a man who knows a thing or two about tender loving goodness, is in talks to join Meryl Streep in Nancy Meyers's untitled romantic comedy for Universal. He'll play one of the two men who get caught up in a love triangle — the one who wins, we hope. [Variety]

Tarantino a Crazy Bastard: We hope you own stock in companies that sell pants, because there's a massive amount of shagadelic pants-shitting 'bout to go down. It seems that Quentin Tarantino has recruited Mike Myers to play British general Ed French in Inglorious Bastards. Mike Myers? Surely he means the Mike Myers who did make-up for The Muppets, or the Mike Myers effects artist on Star Trek, or Michael Myers of Halloween? [Variety]