New Line has cast Drew Barrymore opposite her former boyfriend, Justin Long, in the romantic comedy Going the Distance. The plot finds the pair as a couple dealing with the challenges of a cross-country romance. Documentary director Nanette Burstein (The Kid Stays in the Picture and American Teen) will make her feature debut on the project written by New Line staffer Geoff LaTulippe.

Emily Browning (The Uninvited) will replace Amanda Seyfried in Zack Snyder’s action fantasy Sucker Punch for Warner Bros. The Australian-born Browning is probably best known for her role as Violet in 2004′s Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events. Seyfried had received the offer and was very interested in the starring role as an insane asylum inmate who loses herself in a fantasy world where she dreams about escaping with her fellow inmates. But she had to decline due to scheduling conflicts with the fourth season of Big Love. (HBO wouldn’t release Seyfried from her shooting schedule.) Shooting on Sucker Punch is set for the fall. Evan Rachel Wood, Vanessa Hudgens, Abbie Cornish, and Emma Stone are all still in talks to costar.

What is it about Tony Scott and various modes of transportation? The director of this summer’s Denzel Washington-John Travolta subway movie Pelham 123 — a filmmaker best known as the man behind Top Gun, Days of Thunder, and Crimson Tide — is in negotiations to helm the runaway train movie Unstoppable. Martin Campbell (Casino Royale) was previously attached. The movie is still in development, but if Scott can get a cast together quickly, it could be his next directing vehicle.

Sixteen years after Dazed and Confused put Matthew McConaughey on the map as the stoner-sage David Wooderson and became the gold standard of high school nostalgia comedies, writer-director Richard Linklater has written a “spiritual sequel.” The story follows a group of lost boys and girls during their first weekend of college in 1980. The untitled project isn’t literally spiritual or a sequel, strictly speaking — sadly, none of the characters from the first movie will be featured in this one. But, like Dazed, it attempts to capture an iconic and infinitely confusing moment in a person’s life by following an ensemble of different characters through a short period of time. Much of the action takes place among the members of a college baseball team.

And EW has learned that Linklater has completed the script and has been spending the past few months trying to drum up funding for the project. It says a lot about the state of indie film and these tough economic times that the auteur behind such hits as School of Rock and critically praised masterpieces like Before Sunset would have trouble finding financiers to back a commercial-sounding comedy about college students. Indeed, Linklater sounded pretty mystified by how much the business has changed when he spoke to EW about the project last September. “It’s tough, man,” said Linklater, whose most recent film, Me and Orson Welles, has yet to find a distributor. “Unless it’s a tentpole, sequel, remake, or over-the-top comedy, that’s all the studios are even doing. They’ve kind of admitted they’re not in the business of doing anything else. The slightest level of irony or intelligence and, boom, you’re out of the league, you’re done.”