Odds and ends from Friday:

• Lionsgate came to their senses, and the studio has changed the name of P.D.R., their upcoming based-on-a-true-story, heart-string tugging sports movie about -- wait for it -- triumph over adversity. Originally named for the Philadelphia Department of Recreation (yawn), the film will now be called Pride, a solid, perfectly unmemorable title for what is sure to be well-acted (it stars, among others, Terrence Howard and Evan Ross, who was great in ATL), perfectly unmemorable movie.

• We reported back in February that both Val Kilmer and Meryl Streep had signed on to star in Dark Matter, the debut feature from Chinese opera director Chen Shi-Zheng. The film was about "a Chinese exchange student [played by heartthrob Liu Ye] who takes revenge after [his] hopes for a Nobel Prize are wrecked by internal school politics," and sounded fascinating and pleasingly dorky. Now, about four months later, all of those things remain true -- except for the part about Val Kilmer. According to reports that surfaced yesterday, he's had to leave the project (blasted scheduling conflict) and will be replaced by Aidan Quinn.

• In early May, it was announced that Richard Gere and Terrence Howard (yes, him again) were going to star in Spring Break in Bosnia, a potential-laden film about "a completely hair-brained scheme hatched by a trio of American journalists (including Sebastian Junger, author of A Perfect Storm) to capture a Bosnian war criminal." Their plans didn't work out very well -- shocking, that -- and the three ended up being mistaken for CIA. I  hate when that happens. Originally, Topher Grace was rumored to be in line to play the third journalist, but it was announced yesterday that Jesse Eisenberg (Walt from The Squid and the Whale) will play the part. Nice.
  

I was starting to get a little concerned about Terrence Howard -- after weeks of practically daily casting announcements, we haven't heard about a new project for him in more than a month. Thanks to today's Variety, though, which reports that he's in talks to costar with Richard Gere (and possibly Topher Grace, whose name has also been linked with the project) in Spring Break in Bosnia, we can all breathe again. Thank goodness.

The movie actually sounds potentially entertaining -- it's based on a completely hair-brained scheme hatched by a trio of American journalists (including Sebastian Junger, author of A Perfect Storm) to capture a Bosnian war criminal. Not surprisingly, things didn't work out quite as planned, and the three ended up being mistaken for a CIA hit squad. Oops. The screenplay for the film, which is being billed as a "comic drama" was written by The Matador's Richard Shepard, based on an article about the adventure that Scott Anderson (one of the three journalists) wrote for Esquire.