Jay Baruchel has always seemed kind of unlikely as a movie star, scrawny and sarcastic and not really your leading man type. But while he's carved out a nice niche for himself as a comic performer, and is an indispensable part of How To Train Your Dragon as the voice of Hiccup, he's also covering his bases by branching out as a screenwriter. He co-wrote the hockey comedy Goon that just finished filming, and now THR reports that he's taken on two more jobs, probably enraging a solid handful of screenwriters who don't also have an acting career to fall back on.
The project comic book geeks will be most excited about is Random Acts of Violence, an adaptation of a comic about two guys who write comic books and create a killer character who takes on a life of his own; it's written by Jimmy Palmiotti and Justin Gray, who also did the Jonah Hex comic and are surely hoping the adaptation turns out better this time around. Baruchel will work with his writing partner Jesse Chabot on that one and another one at Summit Entertainment, a new draft of the supernatural thriller The Exorcism Diaries (looks like that mini-trend of exorcism films isn't stopping any time soon). The plot of that one, sadly, sounds more like a deliberate retread of the recent exorcism-tinged films than anything too terribly original:
Summit’s tale centers on a reporter searching for the truth behind the most famous exorcism in history, but soon discovers that the real-life story is not quite finished. As a result, she finds herself in harm’s way of the same supernatural entity that she is chasing.
Baruchel is keeping busy as an actor too, acting for another Canadian treasure, David Cronenberg, in the upcoming Cosmopolis, but he seems like a smart enough guy that I'm just as interested in seeing how he turns out as a writer as well.
