“Sherlock Holmes” is clearly the movie everyone’s talking about. Some Doyle purists have objected to the obviously high-octane approach used in the current film, arguing that Holmes is a cerebral character who solves problems with his mind. He isn’t the “hard-boiled dick” type that emerged with the popularity of pulp magazines like “Black Mask,” giving rise to characters like Sam Spade and probably epitomized by Mickey Spillane’s Mike Hammer. Yet Doyle’s Holmes was no slouch in hand-to-combat, and Doyle mentions Holmes as having backgrounds in boxing and Japanese martial arts (“The Sign of the Four,” “The Adventure of the Empty House”).

Amazingly, the rumors that Brad Pitt is in “Sherlock Holmes,” opening Christmas day, are still circulating. It seems like rumors have been swirling for ages that Pitt is glimpsed in the shadows of the Guy Ritchie re-imagining of Arthur Conan Doyle’s classic, Victorian detective stories, supposedly laying the groundwork for him to co-star in the sequel as the villainous Professor Moriarty.

On September 24th, a spokesperson for Warner Brothers specifically told me that Brad Pitt does not appear in “Sherlock Holmes,” and was not attached to a sequel at that time. The role of Professor Moriarty, if the character does indeed appear in a sequel, has yet to be cast. Producer Daniel Lim recently told Collider the same thing.

Moriarty was created by Doyle but isn’t all that major a character in the original stories. He was dreamed up by Doyle as a foil who could kill off Holmes when the author got tired of the character and wanted to concentrate on what he considered to be his more important literary endeavors. Doyle and Moriarty failed, as it turned out. Doyle hadn’t even written half his Holmes output when he wrote “The Final Problem,” which was meant at the time to be Holmes’ swan song.

Hollywood made Moriarty a prominent recurring villain in the long series of movies starring Basil Rathbone as the best known Holmes, and Nigel Bruce, who chiseled the concept of an elderly, bumbling Watson in stone. George Zucco, Lionel Atwill and Henry Daniell all played Moriarty in that series.

Interestingly, Boris Karloff, one of the greatest movie villains of all time and who was under contract to Universal during part of the period they were producing the Holmes movies, never played the part. He did appear with Rathbone in the movie “The Tower of London.”

Whether or not Pitt will play Moriarty is an open question. He doesn’t seem natural casting. He isn’t English and although now a legitimately middle-aged man, he looks younger. Hugo Weaving would seem a better choice. Or maybe someone think of digitally resurrecting Karloff and give him the shot at the role he never played but should have.

The villain in the current film is Mark Strong, who was in “RocknRolla” for director Guy Ritchie last year, and has been in no fewer than four films in 2009 alone: “Endgame,” “The Young Victoria,” “The Odds” and “Sherlock Holmes.” He has four films in post-production, including Ridley Scott’s uber-budget “Robin Hood,” is filming “The Guard” and is attached to Pixar’s live-action “John Carter of Mars,” which is scheduled to begin filming next year.

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The nominations for the 2010 Screen Actors Guild Awards have just been announced and Brad is up for an award for his role in Inglorious Basterds. Check it out:

ENSEMBLE CAST:
An Education
The Hurt Locker
Inglourious Basterds
Nine
Precious

Even though Brad wasn’t nominated himself, which is a shame as he did an amazing job in Inglorious Basterds, his movie Inglorious Basterds did get nominated a couple of times. Check it out:

BEST MOTION PICTURE, DRAMA
• Avatar
• The Hurt Locker
• Inglourious Basterds
• Precious
• Up in the Air

50 Cent would love to be Brad Pitt for a day, if only so he could romance Brad’s girlfriend Angelina Jolie. He said: “I’d be Brad Pitt. Go sleep with Angelina and come back.”

Meanwhile, 50 has admitted his alcohol tolerance is so low, he gets drunk after two drinks. The rapper told Complex magazine: “For me… two cups is over the limit. After one beer, you’re drunk, technically.”

The 34-year-old star also claimed he is prone to mood swings which affect the people around him. When asked who he most annoying person he knew was, 50 replied: “It might be me. I’m a moody person.”

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Brad Pitt and Robert Downey Jr. going head-to-head onscreen. That’s a tantalizing cinematic throwdown, which explains why even the possibility of such a face-off — in a sequel to a film that has not even opened yet — has been churning through the rumor mill. If Downey’s “Sherlock Holmes” becomes a box-office hit following its Christmas Day opening, could we eventually see the actor’s Holmes joined in a sequel by Brad Pitt as the wily detective’s nemesis James Moriarty?

That’s been the gossip for months. In August there were rumors that Pitt was on the “Holmes” set, and The Hollywood Reporter dished in September that the A-lister was in discussions to take on the role. And now we know — spoiler alert! — that Moriarty does in fact pop up in “Holmes,” albeit swathed in shadows and with a voice not recognizably Pitt’s. So when MTV News had a chance to chat with director Guy Ritchie and his cast, we had to get to the bottom of the mystery.

Had Ritchie talked with Pitt about playing Moriarty? “I can’t tell you that,” the director said, glancing a bit nervously at his publicist. “Maybe Moriarty will surface again …. I’m not allowed to say anything.”

Why be so tight-lipped about something that is not even a possibility? His answers will only fuel the Pitt-as-Moriarty fire. “I’m a big fan of Brad and I’d love to work with Brad,” said Ritchie, who directed Pitt in 2000′s “Snatch.” “Everything he’s done, I’m a big fan of.”

When we put the Pitt questions to Downey, the actor declined to answer or speculate. “We’re not the casting directors and [Moriarty's] kept purposely out of the narrative in the story and, should we be fortunate enough to go forward again, then we’ll probably make casting announcements and that stuff.”

“Holmes” star Mark Strong was a little more forthcoming in our interview, saying he never saw Pitt on set, but that Pitt and Ritchie have a strong creative bond. “I never met [Pitt], but I know that Guy and he are friends, obviously, because they’ve worked together and I know they’d love to get someone of his caliber to play a character of the depth and weight of Moriarty. I know they’ve probably talked about it.”

Rachel McAdams’ character, Irene Adler, actually interacts with the mysterious Moriarty in the film. Did the actress perform alongside Pitt?

“No Brad Pitt sightings,” McAdams said with a laugh, adding sometimes she wasn’t even on camera with another actor. “I was just talking to a dark void.”

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Despite the dire predictions, Brangelina, aka Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie have managed to stay together now for five years.

In order to celebrate their anniversary, Pitt and Jolie reserved a suite at the Chateau Marmont Hotel in Hollywood, according to a report in Life & Style.

Pitt and Jolie were able to keep the November 28 celebration quiet because they kept the staff at the hotel in the dark.

“They checked in around 4 p.m. and were ushered straight to their poolside bungalow,” said a hotel insider. “They were holding hands when they arrived, and Angie was really excited. She was like a kid — she kept asking Brad what he was up to, and he just smiled knowingly. They looked like they were on a date – they had no security with them, and they were incredibly relaxed.”

The couple, who has never married, met in 2004 while they were filming Mr. and Mrs. Smith.

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While I eagerly await for Sony Pictures Classics to release Zhang Yimou’s The First Gun in the U.S. (despite the negative response it’s apparently received at home in China), I can’t help but leapfrog that movie in order to excitedly bring news of the filmmaker’s next film: The Thirteen Women of Jinling (also known as The 13 Women of Nanjing). According to a Chinese website, Jingling will apparently take priority over Yimou’s other in-the-works project, Romance Under a Hawthorn Tree, and it will feature a Hollywood A-list actor in some capacity.

Producer Zhang Weiping mentions only the biggest and best as potentials, with Tom Hanks, Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt allegedly all showing interest. One of these actors could fill the role of a pastor in the film, which will be set in a Nanjing church during the Japanese invasion of 1937. As for the titular women, all prostitutes who sought shelter in church, Weiping says they’re looking for unknown actresses with “good foreign language skills” (likely meaning they can speak enough English to act opposite a big Hollywood movie star).

Jinling is described as a Schindler’s List type of epic film by the producer. And at a cost of $100 million, the film’s budget is the biggest yet for Yimou, who has become mainland China’s most internationally famous director with arthouse dramas like Raise the Red Lantern and action spectacles like Hero. The reported price tag also puts Jingling above John Woo’s recent two-part epic Red Cliff as the most expensive Asian film yet.

With one of those three actors on board, even if only for a small part, Yimou could also see his highest international gross. He’d probably need to feature some of his stylish action showpieces to bring in the large crowd that went to see Hero in American multiplexes, though it’s doubtful Jingling will feature such large-scale war sequences if it wants to be on the level with Schindler’s List.

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I just added some photos of Brad at the UNICEF Ball Honoring Jerry Weintraub. It’s a mix of MQ and HQ. Enjoy!

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Public Appearances > Events from 2009 > UNICEF Ball Honoring Jerry Weintraub

On Monday we reported that Summit Entertainment — the studio behind the ‘Twilight’ franchise — is developing a new sort of “vampire” movie with Brad Pitt’s production company. The new film is to be called Vlad, and will focus on the real life prince who served as the inspiration behind Bram Stoker’s famous novel, “Dracula”.

Entertainment Weekly sat down with actor Charlie Hunnam (Sons of Anarchy), who wrote the script for Vlad, to learn more about just what he has planned for this new film.

“My hope when writing it was for the end result to be more Braveheart than 300,” he said, “and I think that as it’s evolved, we’ve got a pretty good mixture of both.”

Hunnam revealed that he envisions someone like Christian Bale or Colin Farrell in the role, but is leaning towards Farrell. And he reiterates that the film will have nothing to do with fictional vampires, but will hint at the fact that this man is the origin of popular vampirism.

According to Hunnam, the entire first act introduces Vlad as a child and his transition to adulthood. Here’s how he describes it:

First Act: “Basically what happened was, the Ottoman Empire was expanding at an exponentially fast rate with a father-son duo of sultans, who increased the size of their territory tenfold within 50 years. They conquered Vlad’s father, also named Vlad Dracul—Vlad the Dragon. In Eastern Orthodox Catholicism, because of the iconography of George slaying the dragon, the dragon and the devil was one in the same. If you add an ‘a,’ it denotes ‘son of,’ so Dracula literally translates to ‘son of the devil.’ So right away, from the moment he was born, before he did anything heinous of his own volition, he had a pretty bad rap because of his name. So the Ottoman said to Vlad’s father, ‘You can stay in power, rule your country as you wish, allow Catholicism to flourish, but you have to allow my people who will come to live here now equal rights to their faith, Islam.’ There were all of these terms, but overall it was a pretty generous deal until the final moment:
Prince Vlad

The Sultan wanted Vlad’s two youngest children. He intended to raise the children himself, make them devout Muslims, then put them back on the throne at a later date with the proper bloodline and yet loyalty to the Ottoman. So Vlad and his brother Radu went. Vlad was about 12, and already had a pretty elevated sense of who he was, but Radu was only seven and much, much more malleable. So they ended up, in Vlad’s mind, corrupting his brother and converting his brother to Islam. Radu was treated like a prince by the Ottomans, and Vlad was trapped like a slave, like a prisoner. About eight years after they got taken by the Ottoman, his father was murdered, and Vlad decided he was going to escape, avenge his father’s murder, take his throne back and oppose the Ottoman. So he escaped from court, went to his brother, and his brother refused to come with him. It started a 17-year war between the brothers, Christian vs. Muslim.”

This chapter in European history hasn’t been approached on film before, and we congratulate Hunnam on tackling it with a eye towards making something more akin to Braveheart than another ‘Poofy the Vegan Vampire’. This will be an interesting project to watch develop.

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Brad Pitt is ready to produce a remake of “Dracula”. The remake is called “Vlad,” which has the script written by 29-year-old British actor Charlie Hunnam. Brad Pitt has a bit of experience with vampires himself, having starred in 1994’s “Interview with the Vampire”.

Brad Pitt makes a negotiation with music video director Anthony Mandler to direct the film. The actor is going to be producer of the film alongside Dede Gardner via the duo’s Plan B Entertainment production company.

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