Bryce Dallas Howard has boarded ”Anything But Ghosts”, a horror film from ”Obsession” director Carrie Barker. The Bryce Dallas Howard joins the Anything But Ghosts cast news comes as Tessa Thompson, Keke Palmer, and Chris Evans have landed in other high-profile projects, underscoring how casting news is still doing the heavy lifting in a crowded market. Studios are leaning hard on recognizable names, even when the stories themselves are playing with familiar genres – haunted-house frauds, anti-utopias, road movies, and crime spirals.
For Barker, the new film keeps her moving fast after ”Obsession”, and it comes with Jason Blum producing, which is basically Hollywood shorthand for ”this will get attention whether or not anyone has seen a frame yet”. Howard joins Barker, Cooper Tomlinson, and Aaron Paul in a story about two con artists who pretend to investigate the paranormal until they run into actual ghosts. That is a neat enough hook; the bigger question is whether the film can do more than just wink at ghost-hunting TV shows.
Bryce Dallas Howard enters ”Anything But Ghosts”
The supernatural comedy-horror is being set up around a familiar scammer-to-screamer premise, with Barker directing from a script she wrote with Tomlinson. After this, Barker is slated to tackle a new version of ”The Texas Chain Saw Massacre” for A24, which is the sort of assignment that suggests the studio likes her nerve, if not subtlety.
Howard’s addition gives the project a cleaner mainstream profile, and that matters in a horror lane where cast recognition can be the difference between streaming curiosity and opening-weekend noise.
Keke Palmer and Zac Gottsagen lead ”Lottery”
Keke Palmer and ”The Peanut Falcon” star Zac Gottsagen have signed on for the lead roles in Thor Freudenthal’s ”Lottery”, adapted from Patricia Wood’s 2007 novel. The story follows a man with Down syndrome who wins the lottery, escapes his indifferent mother, and heads off on a road trip with a stranger who has her own reason to disappear.
- Director: Thor Freudenthal
- Source material: Patricia Wood’s 2007 novel ”Lottery”
- Lead roles: Keke Palmer and Zac Gottsagen
Tessa Thompson heads into a flooded England
Tessa Thompson, Ebon Moss-Bachrach and ”Adolescence” breakout Owen Cooper are joining Iphaa McArdle’s ”Foxfinder”, a film version of Dawn King’s play. The setting is a half-submerged English countryside under food shortages, where a failing farm may be blamed on foxes and a state investigator named William Bloor is sent in to sort it out.
That premise lands squarely in the current wave of prestige dystopia, where climate anxiety and food insecurity are being filtered through genre fiction instead of policy papers. It is a smart move if the film wants to feel timely without turning into a lecture.
Chris Evans steps into ”My Darling California”
Chris Evans has replaced Josh Brolin in Elijah Bynum’s crime thriller ”My Darling California”, joining Jessica Chastain, Chris Pine, Mikey Madison, Charles Melton and Don Cheadle. The film follows a futile chase for a better life after one crime knits together a TV host, his troubled wife, a country star, two small-time thieves and an ex-convict.
If this kind of cast keeps piling up, it is because the industry knows a simple truth: in a noisy release cycle, an A-list lineup is often the only pitch that cuts through. The open question is whether these projects can offer more than prestige packaging and familiar plot mechanics once the cameras stop rolling.