Casting & Cancellation Updates

Gwyneth Paltrow will be joining Robert Downey Jr. and Terrence Howard in “Iron Man,” the Jon Favreau-directed film due out in May 2008. Paltrow will play Virginia “Pepper” Potts, personal assistant to an industrialist who develops an armored suit to battle bad guys.

Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson and Terence Stamp are set to join Steve Carell and Anne Hathaway in the big screen remake of the 1965 Mel Brooks/Buck Henry TV spy-spoof satire “Get Smart” which originally starred Don Adams and Barbara Feldon in the Carell and Hathaway roles. Dwayne will play the newly created character Agent 23 while Stamp steps in as the evil dude to be reckoned with.

In a bit of TV cancellation news, NBC has taken the fizzle out of the daytime supernatural soap “Passions.” The show has survived for eight seasons but lost ground to the expanding “Today” show which will grow to four hours of daily programming. Episodes of the long-running soap will continue until sometime in August 2007.

Because “Passions” is such a strong brand among young femmes, it’s believed NBC will try to find a way to keep the show alive somewhere other than the network. An Internet platform is a possibility, while NBC might also talk to Disney to see if the conglom would be interested in producing a shortened version of the sudser for its successful SoapNet cabler, according to Variety. Another potential home might be News Corp.’s barely breathing MyNetwork TV, which has had no luck drawing auds with its cheaply produced telenovelas, the trade paper revealed.