Celebrity News

Miles Teller’s ‘Spectacular’ casting break

Sundance breakout title “The Spectacular Now” was originally supposed to star “X-Men: First Class” hero Nicholas Hoult, but the film wound up coming together when Hoult fell out and “Project X” star Miles Teller came aboard. “Shailene Woodley [of ‘The Descendants’] was already attached,” New York-based producer Andrew Lauren told us in Park City the day before his movie was snapped up by upstart distributor A24. As the producers searched for a Hoult replacement, Lauren saw Teller in an amateur short he’d made with pals on YouTube, and knew he was right for the part in the high school drama. The movie — written by Scott Neustadter and Michael H. Weber, the writing team behind “500 Days of Summer” — will come out this summer and also stars Kyle Chandler and Mary Elizabeth Winstead. New York companies like Lauren’s have been on a roll: A24 is also based in the Big Apple, and Harvey Weinstein-backed VOD label Radius has snapped up no less than four films so far, including the hot doc “Twenty Feet From Stardom.”