Warner Bros. and Paramount have partnered to adapt Jonathan Safran Foer's 2005 novel Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close. The story centers on Oskar Schell, a precocious 9-year-old boy who finds a key in a vase that belongs to his father (who perished in the North Tower in the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks) and searches to find the lock that goes with it.

While Stephen Daldry is directing, Tom Hanks and Sandra Bullock play the boy's parents and Thomas Horn has been cast to play the young lead. John Goodman has also joined the cast as the doorman of Oskar's apartment building.

The screenplay has been written by Oscar-winner Eric Roth (Forrest Gump, Benjamin Button) who adapted the novel, which involves multiple narrators and time frames, such as flashbacks. Scott Rudin, who produces the movie, has been developing the project since 2005. His recent Oscar projects include No Country for Old Men, There Will be Blood, Julie & Julia, and Doubt.
The shooting started on February 25, 2011 and went through to May in New York. The film will have a limited release on Christmas Day in the United States, December 25, 2011. It will then open wide on January 20, 2012.

Electric City will be an animated sci-fi series that will be shown on the Web in 20 four-minute installments which will offer a view of the future civilization, focusing on socially conscious themes like energy consumption, the freedom of information and crime and punishment. Tom Hanks conceived, wrote Electric City and will lend his voice to a character.

The webseries will stream exclusively on Yahoo this spring (available in several languages, including Spanish and French) before heading to more traditional outlet. It will be distributed online and through tablet devices with the usual interactivity and social media connections, but also a few new features. Electric City could also be a game, and if the show proves popular it could work its way to home video, TV and even a 90-minute theatrical release.

Tom Hanks's Playtone production company has teamed up with Reliance Big Entertainment of India (RBE) to create this project.

Tom Hanks and Gary Goetzman have come on board to produce a new HBO movie with their production company, Playtone : Game Change.
Game Change is a movie which follows John McCain’s 2008 presidential campaign, from his selection of Alaska Governor Sarah Palin as his running mate to their ultimate defeat in the general election.
Ed Harris is set to play John McCain, while Julianne Moore will play the role of Sarah Palin. Melissa Farman has been cast as Bristol Palin and Ron Livingston (Band of Brothers) has also signed on to play Mark Wallace, a senior adviser to McCain-Palin 2008.

Cloud Atlas will be co-directed and is co-written by The Wachowskis (The Matrix) and Tom Tykwer. The filming will start in September and will take place in Germany, Scotland and Mallorca.
The casting is pretty impressive as the following actors and actresses have been confirmed : Tom Hanks, Halle Berry, Susan Sarandon, Jim Sturgess, Ben Whishaw, Hugh Grant, Hugo Weaving, Bae Doona and Jim Broadbent.

The film is an adaptation of David Mitchel's book which consists of six nested stories that take us from the remote South Pacific in the nineteenth century to a distant, post-apocalyptic future. Each tale is revealed to be a story that is read (or watched) by the main character in the next. This novel is an epic story of humankind in which the actions and consequences of our lives impact one another throughout the past, present and future as one soul is shaped from a murderer into a savior and a single act of kindness ripples out for centuries to inspire a revolution.

Hugo Weaving explained in an interview that he will be playing six different characters in the movie, and so will the other actors and actresses. They will all play different characters in the film, probably one in each story.

Warner Bros is set to distribute the film in North America, and Focus Features International has signed on to handle international sales and distribution of the film overseas.

Produced by Tom Hanks, Gary Goetzman, Christina Steinberg and Kathleen Kennedy, among others, Rise of the Guardians is a 2012 animation comedy film directed by William Joyce, and Peter Ramsey. It stars Hugh Jackman, Isla Fisher, and Jude Law and is written by William Joyce and David Lindsay-Abaire.

The movie will be released on November 21, 2012 in the United States and December 7, 2012 in the United Kingdom.

Sony Pictures Entertainment has attached Tom Hanks to play Capt. Richard Phillips, the leader of the cargo ship Maersk Alabama who gave himself up as a hostage to Somali pirates to keep his crew from having to leave the ship with them. After three days alone with the armed pirates in a small lifeboat, Phillips was saved by Navy SEALS who staged a raid that left three captors dead and another in custody.

The movie is based on Richard Phillips's memoir A Captain's Duty: Somali Pirates, Navy SEALs, and Dangerous Days at Sea and the script was written by Billy Ray (Hart's War, Flightplan, State of Play…). The movie will be produced by the team behind The Social Network, that is to say Scott Rudin, Michael De Luca, Dana Brunetti and Kevin Spacey. Tom Hanks and Catherine Keener, who will play Andrea Phillips, are the only actors to be attached to the project. Paul Greengrass (The Bourne Trilogy, United 93...) will direct.

The movie was supposed to be shot in New Orleans, Louisiana and Mobile, Alabama.  But due to logistical issues and the fact that a sister ship similar to the Maersk Alabama needed for the filming was not available, the movie will not be shot there after all and new locations may have been found. According to a casting call, filming will be taking place from March until May in Morocco and a production tem was in discussions with the Malta Film Commission.
Sony Pictures announced that the movie will be released in theaters on March 22, 2013.

Tom Hanks is the first actor to be officially attached to Kathryn Bigelow's next movie, Triple Frontier (also titled Sleeping Dogs). Producer Charles Roven confirmed it to ComingSoon.net. The shooting of the movie will probably start sometime in fall 2011.

Actors Leonardo DiCaprio, Christian Bale, Sean Penn and Jeremy Renne have all expressed their interest in the project but none has been officially attached to it. Kathryn Bigelow would co-write this movie along with writer Mark Boal (The Hurt Locker, In the Valley of Elah).

The story is set in the organized crime zone between Paraguay, Argentina and Brazil.

Actress Chloë Sevigny is currently developing a four-hour miniseries based on the life of Lizzie Borden that Tom Hanks and Gary Goetzman's production company, Playtone, will executive produce. Chloë Sevigny has been a driving force behind the miniseries, in which she'll star in the title role and serve as co-executive producer. Bryce Kass is writing the screenplay of this miniseries which is set to air in 2012 on HBO.

Lizzie Borden was a Massachusetts spinster put on trial for killing her father and step-mother with a hatchet in 1892. She was acquitted, but almost everyone back then (and now) was pretty sure she did it.

HBO is developing a six-seasons series based on Neil Gaiman's 2001 novel, American Gods and it's Tom Hanks and Gary Goetzman's production company, Playtone, that will produce it. Each season will be of 10-12 (hour-long) episodes with a budget of around $35-40 million per season. Its debuts is planned for 2013 at the earliest.

The project was brought to them by Robert Richardson, a cinematographer credited in Shutter Island, Inglourious Basterds and Kill Bill and who won two Oscars for The Aviator and JFK. He is set to write the pilot along with Neil Gaiman and maybe direct it.

The book, which won both the Hugo and Nebula Awards, tells the story of an ex-convict named Shadow who finds himself in the midst of a war between two sets of gods. After three years in prison, Shadow has done his time. But as the time until his release ticks away, he can feel a storm brewing. Two days before he gets out, his wife Laura dies in a mysterious car crash, in adulterous circumstances. Dazed, Shadow travels home, only to encounter the bizarre Mr Wednesday claiming to be a refugee from a distant war, a former god and the king of America. Together they embark on a very strange journey across the States, along the way solving the murders which have occurred every winter in one small American town. But the storm is about to break.Disturbing, gripping and profoundly strange, Gaiman’s epic novel sees him on the road to the heart of America.

American Idiot, Green Day's acclaimed album, has been turned into a Broadway musical. It is about to be adapted to the big screen.

Universal picked up the screen rights and has hired Michael Mayer, the director of the stage production, to direct the movie version. Dustin Lance Black, the Oscar-winning writer of Milk, is writing the screenplay and the band’s frontman Billie Joe Armstrong taking one of the roles, as he did on Broadway. Robert Pattinson, the star of Twilight, is rumored to play the lead character. Tom Hanks will serve as a producer, along with the members of the punk rock trio.

A concept album tackling the ideas of love vs. rage, American Idiot follows three characters : the aimless Jesus of Suburbia, punk rock freedom fighter St. Jimmy, and Whatsername. It was released in 2004 and quickly became one of the band's biggest albums.

Universal and Tom Hanks's production company, Playtone, have optioned the rights to Erik Larson's nonfiction bestseller In the Garden of Beasts : Love, Terror and an American Family in Hitler’s Berlin, which was published in May 2011.
Not only is Tom Hanks interested in producing an adaptation of this book, apparently he's also interested in starring as William Dodd. This would be Tom Hanks's second movie set during World War II.

The book tells the true tale of William Dodd, the United States' reluctant and mild-mannered ambassador to Berlin in 1933, and his daughter Martha, a vivacious socialite who had romantic affairs with a Gestapo official and a Soviet spy. Dodd and his family at first naively navigated life in Nazi Germany (Dodd’s daughter was excited when Hitler kissed her hand) but they slowly gained awareness of the mounting brutality around them. Dodd gradually realized the atrocities that were being conducted around him as World War II escalated.

Tom Hanks and Gary Goetzman serve as executive producers for a telepic adaptated from Peter Carlson’s book K Blows Top: A Cold War Comic Interlude Starring Nikita Khrushchev, America's Most Unlikely Tourist which documents Khrushchev’s 13-day tour of the U.S. during the 1959 heights of the Cold War. The project is once again for HBO.

Paul Giammati (who played the title character in HBO's miniseries John Adams) has been cast to play Soviet Leader Nikita Khrushchev.

Paul Bernbaum is set to pen the script, while Tom Hanks and Gary Goetzman are executive producers with Perri Kipperman and David Stern serving as co-exec producers.

Back in 2009, it was announced that Tom Hanks was working on bringing the classic 60's astronaut action figure Major Matt Mason to the big screen. Major Matt Mason was an astronaut action figure who took part in imaginary adventures on the moon in the 1960's.

Graham Yost (From the Earth to the Moon, Band of Brothers, The Pacific) is writing the screenplay, with Tom Hanks co-writing. He will also serve as a producer and may well enlist as an actor to play the lead character.
Robert Zemeckis (Forrest Gump, Cast Away, The Polar Express, Back to the Future) is in talks to direct the live-action movie which will be filmed in 3D. The film reportedly has a budget of $100 million.

Tom Hanks and his long-time producing partner at Playtone, Gary Goetzman, are developing a new show for HBO : a half-hour comedy project entitled Players that follows the lives of college athletes.
James Evans and Darryl Scott will serve as producers on the project with Tom Hanks and Gary Goetzman attached as executive producers.

We don't have more information yet as to who will direct, write or act in Players.

Jonathan Demme, who directed Philadelphia, and Walter Mosley will be co-write a pilot based on the novelist's new detective series The Long Fall.

Demme will direct the pilot, and the series will be overseen by Tom Hanks and Gary Goetzman's production company, Playtone.

Tom Hanks and Oprah Winfrey will co-produce, through their respective production companies, The Story of Edgar Sawtelle.

Universal Pictures has hired William Broyles Jr. (Apollo 13, The Polar Express and Cast Away) to adapt the novel written by David Wroblewski.

It's also said that Tom Hanks would like to use the performance-capture, the same way James Cameron did for Avatar and that he would play one of the characters... one of the three dogs. No director has been hired yet.

After working together on the three Toy Story movies, Tom Hanks and Tim Allen could team up again for a Disney movie, Jungle Cruise. Disney wants to turn venerable attractions at its theme parks into movies, and Jungle Cruise is one of them. The Disney attraction, which first opened in 1955, simulates a dramatic riverboat cruise featuring king cobras, lions angry rhinoceros and fierce spear-wielding natives.

So far we only know that Tim Allen would play the cruise captain and Tom Hanks would star as a family man on holiday aboard the vessel.

Disney tantalizingly promised that the movie will feature aspects that will make it more than a straight-up adventure. The live-action film will be written by Roger Schulman, whose previous credits include Shrek and produced by David Hoberman and Todd Lieberman, the team behind the award-winning The Fighter.

Tom Hanks has been approached by Paramount Studio to play the President of the United States in a movie called Partiot Down, which will be produced by Kevin Walsh and Brad Weston. The movie will be an action-thriller that centers on a U.S. President who has to go on run in Afghanistan after Air Force One gets shot down as it was flying over the country.
Ian Stone, who’s worked as a second assistant director on huge films like There Will Be Blood, Munich, War of the Worlds, and most recently The Adventures of Tintin: The Secret of the Unicorn, will be making his writing debut with Patriot Down.

Tom Hanks is not officially attached to the project as he's not answered yet whether or not he will accept the part and the movie is still in its early stage of development. This could also be just one among many offers he gets...
 

The Walt Disney Company is reportedly in final negotiations over the rights to Saving Mr Banks, the scripted saga of how Walt Disney persuaded Australian author P.L. Travers to sell him the rights to make a film out of Mary Poppins. That courtship took 14 years.

There have been rumors of Tom Hanks and Meryl Streep being considered to portray Disney and Travers, respectively. Kelly Marcel penned the screenplay, which is currently on the industry's Black List, an annual list of the most well-liked screenplays as voted on by of Hollywood executives, agency professionals, and high-level assistants, but that have yet to be picked up for production. According to screenwriter Kelly Marcel, the script covers “a three-week period in which Disney invited [Travers] to L.A. to try and get the script for ‘Mary Poppins’ right”.

Disney is expected to make an official announcement about the project once negotiations over Marcel's script have been finalized. 

After The Da Vinci Code and Angels & Demons, Columbia Pictures is ready to adapt the third Robert Langdon adventure, The Lost Symbol. Tom Hanks has not yet signed on for it but he told MTV at the premiere of Where the Wild Things Are, that he was ready to take back the role of Robert Langdon if it were to be adapted to the screen.

After Steven Knight (Eastern Promises) provided the first draft of the screenplay, Dan Brown himself has been hired to pen a second draft. We already know that Ron Howard will not be back to direct it but he signed on, with Brian Grazer, as producer.

Columbia Pictures is about to start negotiations with director Mark Romanek (Never Let Me Go) and looks at a filming for 2013. The story takes place in Washington, D.C and focuses on Freemason conspiracy.