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All American: Homecoming cast member Jaalen Best has been cast as Muhammad Ali in the Prime Video show The Greatest. The show is the first authorized scripted series about the legendary boxer. The show could provide Best with his breakthrough role.

An alumnus from the All American: Homecoming cast is set to play iconic boxer Muhammad Ali. Born Cassius Marcellus Clay Jr., the iconic activist and sports legend lived from 1942 through 2016. Numerous documentaries and biopics have been made about the icon's life, with one of the most recent onscreen portrayals being the Oscar-nominated movie One Night in Miami... in which he was played by Eli Goree opposite Kingsley Ben-Adir as Malcolm X, Aldis Hodge as Jim Brown, and Leslie Odom Jr. as Sam Cooke.

Per Variety, Jaalen Best has been cast to star as Muhammad Ali in the upcoming Prime Video show The Greatest, which is set to focus primarily...

Amazon Prime Video has greenlit “The Greatest,” the first-ever authorized scripted series about the life of Muhammad Ali. Jaalen Best will star as Ali while Ben Watkins, creator of Amazon’s upcoming Alex Cross series, is set as showrunner.

“The Greatest” was produced in collaboration with Ali’s estate, with his widow Lonnie Ali serving as executive producer. The series’ official description reads, “The amazing victories and defeats that made Ali a legend, both in and out of the ring, have been well documented and while those landmark events will live in ‘The Greatest,’ the heartbeat of the story is fueled by all the moments that took place outside of the spotlight. The world remembers an icon, but ‘The Greatest’ is about a man, a husband, a father, a brother and a son.

Ali’s life rights were originally acquired by executive producer Josh Wakely, who brought the project to Amazon.

Noah Jupe, who is starring opposite Michael Douglas in the Apple TV+ Benjamin Franklin biopic, is leading a TV drama adaptation of Sebastian Faulks’ cult classic Engleby.

Jupe will play the titular character, an enigmatic outsider who graduates from 1970s campus life to 1980s Fleet Street and beyond – haunted all the while by an unsolved mystery involving a friend and fellow student during their university days. The six-part drama is described as a “quintessential British murder mystery meets acute psychological character study, with a healthy dose of dark wit.”

Michael Keillor, who is directing the upcoming BBC/Netflix drama on the Lockerbie disaster, is directing, and Channel 4-backed production outfit Freedom Scripted is producing. No network is attached as of yet. Stage and screenwriters Ryan Craig and Jess Ruston are penning the series, with Freedom Scripted’s MD Mike Ellen executive producing.

Ryan Craig has only directed one feature in his career thus far — 2010′s Chris Pine-starring Small Town Saturday Night — and that may not change right away, as he’s been hired for a writing job at Warner Bros. As THR has learned, the director is set to script an adaptation of Takedown, a novel by Brad Thor that serves as the fifth installment of his Scott Harvath series.

Produced by Bill Gerber and Casey Wasserman, the project is something that the studio would like to be the start of a new franchise, in the (shocker) “Bourne Identity mold.” Shaky cameras, agents running around, people getting beaten with household objects? Sounds about right. There are ten books in the series, so they have plenty of room to make future installments.

The plot appears to be on a bigger scale, though, following the Harvath character in his attempt to capture a...

Ryan Craig ("Small Town Saturday Night") has been hired to pen an adaptation of the Brad Thor international action thriller novel "Takedown" at Warner Bros. Pictures says Heat Vision.

"Takedown" is the fifth novel in a series following Scot Harvath, a former Navy Seal Team 6 member turned black-ops counterterrorism agent. In this story, Harvath must stop a terrorist mastermind who has unleashed chaos in New York City with his latest attack over Fourth of July weekend.

Bill Gerber and Casey Wasserman are producing. Thor has penned ten novels in the series thus far, Warners acquired the rights late last year and at the time were looking at the first novel in the series - "The Lions of Lucerne" - as a potential launching pad.

Warner Bros. has tapped writer/director Ryan Craig (Small Town Saturday Night) to adapt Brad Thor's international action thriller novel Takedown. For those unfamiliar, Takedown is the fifth installment in a series of books that follow the adventures of Scot Harvath, a former Navy Seal Team 6 member who goes on to become a counterterrorism agent - a position that undoubtedly finds him in all kinds of bullet-ridden/"end of civilization as we know it" type of scenarios. More specifically, Takedown finds Harvath attempting to stop a terrorist who has attacked New York City over Fourth of July weekend. News of Craig's hiring comes courtesy of Heat Vision. Per their report, Bill Gerber and Casey Wasserman will produce Takedown with hopes of turning it into a project of The Bourne Identity ilk (surprise, surprise). If you'd like to know a little more about the project, hit the jump for a synopsis of Thor's book.

With the success of last year’s Star Trek, Chris Pine has become a hot commodity in Hollywood. So it should come as no surprise that the straight-to-dvd film, Small Town Saturday Night uses both “Chris Pine from Star Trek” and “original song ‘Someday Came Today’ by Chris Pine” as promotional tools on the DVD cover. In fact, since a straight to DVD release is never actually a good sign for a film, they might have been better off renaming the movie: Chris Pine Chris Pine just so people might actually go ahead and check it out. Find out if the film is even worth checking out after the jump:

Small Town Saturday Night follows the story of Rhett Ryan (Pine), an aspiring musician, as he spends his last day in the small town he grew up in before he heads to Nashville to follow his lifelong dream. His girlfriend,...

It’s not surprising a film like Small Town Saturday Night never found theaters. Written and directed by Ryan Craig, this small little indie about the small lives of inhabitants of a, wait for it, “small town” doesn’t offer anything controversial in content, revolutionary in technology or relevant by way of movie stars. Yes, Chris Pine stars as Rhett Ryan, a guitar-strumming dreamer on his way to Nashville and bigger and better things, but this thing was made and cut before people knew what a “Chris Pine” was.

This is the kind of movie that recalls past movies, but does it with an earnest that can only come from true experiences from real people. From now until the end of time, characters in movies will continue to say things like “everything will be alright” and “just be yourself,” and, in turn, so will characters in real life.

And why?...

Now that Chris Pine has hit it big in what promises to be one of the bigger franchise reboots of the next decade, it’s interesting to see where he’ll spend his screen time when he’s not sitting off-kilter on the captain’s chair. It’s an interesting question for every star who finds their biggest success at the start of a huge franchise, and often the non-related films they make receive a fair bit of scrutiny as audiences attempt to determine whether or not the actor has a future when that franchise ends. For Chris Pine this still applies, and so his first independent drama choice since playing Kirk has an interesting level of weight behind it, and to his credit Small Town Saturday Night works in his favor, showing off a more contemplative counterbalance to his egotistical jokester from Star Trek.

No one is more tired...

See the first poster from the Ryan Craig-directed and written drama "Small Town Saturday Night," starring Chris Pine, Robert Pine, John Hawkes, Bre Blair, Lin Shaye, Muse Watson, Shawn Christian and Brent Briscoe. Coming in 2010, the film tells of a country musician whose relationship and career do not mix well. The story also involves people within the town and how the couple's relationship affects them. Craig makes his feature-length directorial debut as well as his writing debut on the project. His previous credits are for TV's "Dinner: Impossible," "Piano Man in a Guitar Town" as well as "Taildaters."...

There are few web series that I’ve enjoyed watching; of those, Matt Koval’s "The Fuplers" is probably my favorite. The series chronicles the table-time interactions of your typical Mondo Bizarro family, with Koval playing Mom, Dad, Teen Son, and lithping, pig-tailed Little Daughter. According to Koval’s profile on his website, in one year his 20-video YouTube channel has grown from 50 to 50,000 subscribers, while "The Fuplers" has been averaging 300,000 views per episode. Additionally, earlier this year Koval wrote and directed a web series for Fox Digital Studios. The Los Angeles-based filmmaker has also done work away from the Internet. Among his film credits are Ryan Craig’s feature Small Town Saturday Night, starring Star [...]...

When it comes to the first photos and synopsis from upcoming films, Collider has reaped great rewards from this year’s American Film Market (Afm). For those who don’t know, Afm is where film buyers from around the world come once a year to buy movies and also pre-buy films in development. Simply put, this is where a lot of money changes hands in the film industry and it’s where many decisions about what you and I get to see are made. In an effort to try and raise a film’s profile or attract film buyers, many of the studios distribute full synopses and still images for their movies.

With that in mind, we have grabbed some of those synopses and images for Manolete (starring Adrien Brody and Penelope Cruz), Mona Lisa, Pearblossom, Small Town Saturday Night (starring Chris Pine), and The Long Good Friday. Hit the...