Super Troopers 3 will be called Winter Soldiers, won't be crowdfunded

Welcome to Development Hell, the fiery pit into which we fling recent developments in casting, distribution, and everything else that’s new and mildly interesting in the Boschian phantasmagoria of the entertainment industry.

The weekend of San Diego Comic-Con is sort of the busiest weekend of the year for people who write about pop culture news, as its the one time when the kind of things we report on are legitimately the biggest stories in the world—assuming you care more about superhero movies than politics, which is a fairly safe assumption. Of course, while we were writing about Godzilla trailers and Shazam! trailers, some news stuff inevitably ended up falling through the cracks. These… are their stories. Chung chung.

• Super Troopers 2 didn’t get great reviews, but it made a whole bunch of money from weedsters who wanted to celebrate Big Weed Day in style (the movie came out on 4/20, which was very funny). During a Comic-Con panel this weekend, the Broken Lizard guys who made the Super Troopers movie teased that they’re working on another sequel that’ll be called Super Troopers 3: Winter Soldiers. That’s obviously a Marvel reference, but apparently the guys are planning to take the title more literally and are joking about filming the movie in the summer. Marvel reference or not, Jay Chandrasekhar doesn’t think they’ll have to crowdfund this one. [via Vulture]
• Jennifer Connelly is in talks to play the female lead in the Top Gun sequel, but since this is a movie about macho bro pilots, that means she’ll be “a single mother who runs a local bar near the Navy base.” Were all of the cool pilot roles taken by Miles Teller and Tom Cruise? [via The Hollywood Reporter]
• At Comic-Con, Andrew Lincoln confirmed the thing we’ve all known about for a while: He’s leaving The Walking Dead. Lincoln joked that he wasn’t going to cry during the show’s panel, since he had “done enough crying onscreen.” [via Variety]
• We were busy playing sports or whatever on Friday when this news destroyed the world, but Taylor Swift is going to appear in a movie version of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Cats. We assume this decision was based completely on the fact that she famously has some cats, and she’ll be appearing alongside Jennifer Hudson, James Corden, and Ian McKellen. [via Variety]
• Jason Clarke and Helen Mirren, who apparently became best friends while filming Winchester, will reunite for HBO’s limited series about Catherine The Great. The project doesn’t have a name yet, but it will revolve around Catherine’s “politically tumultuous and sexually charged” reign in Russia. [via Deadline]
• Bristol Palin is joining the cast of MTV’s Teen Mom OG, and if you don’t watch the show already, this will not convince you to start. We assume Sarah Palin will make her way into every shot, even if it just means standing motionless in the background like Patton Oswalt did in that King Of Queens episode. [via Deadline]
• Earlier this month, we reported that Jon M. Chu was developing a Thai cave rescue movie to compete with the one Pure Flix was developing, but now there are apparently six Thai cave rescue movies in development. Thailand is even setting up a special committee to oversee all of these projects. [via Variety]