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Catherine Zeta-Jones has been set to star in Side Effects , the thriller that Steven Soderbergh will direct. She joins Blake Lively, Jude Law and Channing Tatum, who are also negotiating. The Scott Z. Burns scripted film is being financed by Megan Ellison’s Annapurna Pictures, with production to start in April in New York on a thriller that has a budget in the $30 million range. Lorenzo di Bonaventura is producing with Greg Jacobs and Burns. Open Road recently signed on to distribute in the U.S. The film is a potboiler in the Jagged Edge-Basic Instinct mold, and Zeta-Jones will play Dr. Erica Siebert. Lively plays a troubled and depressed woman who is taking serious amounts of prescription drugs, which leads her into a relationship with another doctor (Law). Her intake is ostensibly designed to help her deal with the anxiety surrounding the pending release of her husband (Tatum) from prison. Burns wrote it several years ago and set it up at Miramax under the title The Side Effects

The final piece of the casting puzzle is in place for Rock Of Ages , the Adam Shankman-directed adaptation of the Broadway musical for New Line Cinema. Malin Akerman is set to play the role of Constance, a journalist who intends to write an expose on decadent rocker Stacee Jaxx ( Tom Cruise ). After a seduction, and after they sing a duet on the Foreigner song I Want To Know What Love Is , they find out in a naughty bedroom romp. This has been a hot role. Shankman at first courted Anne Hathaway , who couldn't do it because she landed the Catwoman role in The Dark Knight Rises. Then, he courted Amy Adams, but Shankman again lost out to a superhero when she landed Lois Lane in Man of Steel. Akerman joins Bryan Cranston , who plays the mayor of Los Angeles, his prudish wife that Catherine Zeta-Jones will play, Cruise, Alec Baldwin, Mary J. Blige, Russell Brand, Paul Giamatti , Diego Boneta and Julianne Hough . Not a bad cast for a Chris D'Arienzo musical that started as a s