For the last few months, Ken Kwapis (He's Just not That Into You, License To Wed) has been busy putting together the movie Whales, and signing up Drew Darrymore and John Krasinski to star. Now they've got company in the form of Forgetting Sarah Marshall star Kristen Bell, who THR reports is in negotiations to join the movie.
The film is based on the true story of a trio of California gray whales that got trapped in a small (and shrinking) pocket of open water, surrounded by ice in the Arctic Circle, too far from the sea for them to be able to escape without drowning. A small town reporter (Krasinski) and a Greenpeace activist (Barrymore) break the story and turn into into an international cause celebre, which even results in a thaw in Cold War relations, with Regan and Gorbachev stepping in to try and save the whales.
Bell will play a reporter from Los Angeles who's aiming for the big time, who thinks her greatest assets are her looks.
However, let's hope the actual film is as interesting as it sounds, as the book it's based on is called Freeing the Whales: How the Media Created the World's Greatest Non-Event, which doesn't exactly inspire confidence that the truth was as arresting as the fiction the media created. Filming on Whales is currently scheduled to start this autumn.