Will Hot Titles Spark a Studio TIFF War?

· All is relatively quiet on the TIFF sales front, but that doesn't mean an avalanche of acquisitions couldn't crush us all at any minute. Variety names Cracks, Get Low, The Joneses, Harry Brown, Solitary Man, The Loved Ones, I Am Love and Chloe as the belles of the ball. The Reporter also mentions Lebanon and A Single Man. (Several of those were already called out by our top TIFF oddsmaker S.T.) To that list I'd add the British film The Disappearance of Alice Creed, a fiendishly entertaining little three-person/one-set crime puzzler that could have some nice commercial potential. [Variety]

Redford's first movie since 2007, Jeffrey Dean Morgan saves small town America, and Eric McCormack cons us all, as Hollywood Ink continues after the jump.

· Meanwhile a film that hasn't even begun shooting yet, Steven Soderbergh's one-woman-army picture Knockout starring MMA fighter Gina Carano, has been snapped up by Lionsgate, using the following, fairly complex business formula: Hot Woman + Kicking Ass + Soderbergh= $$$.

· James McAvoy and Robin Wright Penn have been cast in Robert Redford's first directorial effort since 2007 flop Lions for Lambs; it's a dramatization of the moments following Abraham Lincoln's assassination called The Conspirator. Penn plays the only woman on trial for conspiring to kill the President, McAvoy plays her defense attorney. [Variety]

· Jeffrey Dean Morgan is close to joining the Red Dawn remake currently in production in Michigan, playing the head of a Special Forces team who discovers a band of teenaged guerrillas fighting off a Russian and Chinese invasion of their home town. The 2011 Oscar derby starts now! [Variety]

· Gabriel Macht, Hank Azaria and Oliver Platt have been cast in Ed Zwick's ensemble romantic comedy Love and Other Drugs, which already stars Anne Hathaway, Jake Gyllenhaal and Judy Greer. [THR]

· Will & Grace's Eric McCormack works! He'll star as real life conman Clark Rockefeller, about the German immigrant who fooled everyone into thinking he was an heir to the Rockefeller fortune, in a Lifetime movie about the strange, Six Degrees of Separation-like case. He's also attached to play a widower in a sitcom pilot from the guys who brought you 'Til Death, which hasn't found a network yet. [THR]