It's been a busy week for Emma Watson. Not only did she turn 18 (a landmark which caused no small amount of cheering among the guys I know -- you pervs!), and not only did she inherit her Harry Potter fortune, but now she's landed her first real non-Potter role. According to The Hollywood Reporter, she is going to star in Napoleon and Betsy, a historical romance written and directed by Benjamin Ross. It is set to begin shooting in the fall to work around the scheduled 2009 start of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.

Watson will play Betsy, a young and headstrong noblewoman who is trapped on the island of St. Helena. There, she meets and falls in love with the exiled Napoleon. It's based loosely on a true story -- the real Betsy was all of thirteen, and wrote a book recalling how Napoleon enjoyed playing childish games with her and her siblings. Not quite Harlequin material. I can't help but think that a movie about a playful Napoleon might be more interesting than a bodice ripper. (Possibly, bodices will not be ripped.) The role originally belonged to Scarlett Johannson, who gave it up when the film headed in a younger direction. She is still set to produce the film.

As Napoleon was 46-years-old when exiled to St. Helena, they must really be aiming for the "creepy" level. Perhaps Hollywood will re-imagine him as a handsome twenty-something. I'm envisioning James McAvoy, at least for Watson's sake.

Someone get this gal a Delorean, because Scarlett Johannson has been doing a lot of time traveling lately. In Michael Bay's flop, The Island, she was trapped in a frightening vision of the future, but lately she's been dipping into the past with increasing regularity ever since Girl with a Pearl Earring.

She can currently be seen in the 1940s era The Black Dahlia, and will also appear in Christopher Nolan's turn of the century magic thriller, The Prestige. After that she has lined up The Other Boleyn Girl (1500s), Napoleon and Betsy (1800s) and now Mary, Queen of Scots (back to the 1500s), in which the gal will take on the role of Queen Mary of Scotland.

While we support Scarlett's love of the historical pieces, can we please see her out of a hoop skirt and in a t-shirt and jeans sometime soon?

How does it happen that there are so frequently movies about the same damn thing in production simultaneously? Be they over volcanoes, escaped zoo animals, Truman Capote, or Marvin Gaye, races to hit the screen first seem to take place insanely often -- and it's happening again, this time with projects about Napoleon. And they're not only about Napoleon: Both films are about "his final days on St Helena and his friendship with a 15-year-old [English girl]." In this case, though, the similarity is not a coincidence.

Scarlett Johansson, who will star in Napoleon and Betsy (Though how the hell she's going to play 15 is a mystery to me.), was once in line to play the same role in The Monster of Longwood, the other Napoleon project. When she didn't get the job, she promptly threw together her own production of the same story, the cheeky devil. Right now, though, it looks like Longwood and director Patrice Chéreau (the man who, in Queen Margot, gave us the most gorgeous corpses the world has ever known) will have the last laugh: Chéreau expects to begin shooting this winter, while Johansson's project has no hope of starting until 2007, due to her own busy schedule.