· Despite their professed interest to turn the Tony Award-winning smash musical The Book of Mormon into a movie, creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone officially want you to know there are no development plans presently in the works. "We did a stage show and it worked out way better than we ever thought, and we'd like it to be that for a while, you know, without contaminating it with a movie," Parker said this week. Now you know. [THR]
· Jeremy Renner is attached to star as George Leslie, the title character in an adaptation of author J. North Conway's historical saga The King of Heists. Leslie, an otherwise unassuming gentleman in 19th-century New York City, "secretly put together a crew and masterminded a heist of nearly $3 million in cash and securities from the Manhattan Savings Institution in 1878." Renner will also co-produce. [Deadline]
· To no one's real surprise, the glacially slow process of developing a Terminator reboot with Arnold Schwarzenegger and rights-holder Megan Ellison has sent director Justin Lin packing. He'll make the sixth Fast and the Furious film while they get their shit together -- like, you know, a script, a studio, a budget... little things. [Deadline]
· Paramount plans a 25-year, $700 million overhaul of its lot on Melrose Ave.: "Portions of the lot along Melrose and limited areas within the main production area are being targeted for development, although the studio said it will maintain many of the historic structures while modernizing them. The plan also involves six properties in Hollywood adjacent to the studio." And jobs! Reportedly more than 7,000 of them! Yay! [THR]
· Are Netflix and embattled CEO Reed Hastings actually on the right track with their controversial plan to split their DVD and streaming operations? Patrick Goldstein makes a compelling case in their favor. [LAT]
· Here you'll find a conservative columnist daring to conflate the unpopularity of his ideology in Hollywood with the alienation felt by gays. Read at your discretion, and remember to spit-take away from your computer. [Big Hollywood]
· Speaking of the gays, so begins the best college memoir you'll read all day: "I was a young gay man hoping university athletics would help me fit in. Then the oil wrestling began." [Salon]
· So what's shakin' with North Korea? Oh, not a lot, just trying to figure out why we only had 25 refugees from there in 2010 compared to, say, 12,000 from Bhutan. "It's too small a number," one analyst notes. You think? [38 North]