When Sherlock Holmes and Doctor Watson embark on their next adventure, their adversary will be a character who has long bedeviled the famed detective. He’ll also reportedly be a face familiar to fans of one of the best shows on television.

According to the Latino Review, British actor Jared Harris, who stars as advertising executive Lane Pryce on AMC’s Mad Men, is set to join the cast of the Sherlock sequel as none other than the villainous Professor Moriarty.

As Batman has The Joker and Superman has Lex Luthor, so does Holmes have the mad professor. Described by Holmes in one of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s original novels as the “Napoleon of Crime,” Moriarty is the detective’s nemesis and archenemy.

For Harris, the role marks yet another step up the Hollywood ladder after years of great performances in smaller roles in such movies as I Shot Andy Warhol and The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. The 49-year-old actor is perhaps best known as Pryce, the last man standing from Mad Men’s third season British invasion.

Harris joins a returning Robert Downey Jr. and Jude Law in the Holmes cast, along with the recently announced additions of Stephen Fry as Holmes’ older brother, and Girl With the Dragon Tattoo star Noomi Rapace as a French gypsy.

Sherlock Holmes 2 is set to begin shooting in October, with a planned theatrical release set for December 2011.

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Johnny Depp is many things: talented, handsome and eccentric. Make that very eccentric.

The star of Edward Scissorhands and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory is hard at work in England shooting the latest chapter of the Pirates of the Caribbean saga. But if you think setting sail for a fourth time would make the star a little seasick – if not sick of the sea – you couldn’t be more wrong.

Britain’s The Sun newspaper is reporting that the 47-year-old actor has chartered a yacht that he sails down the River Thames in London every morning to get to work. The boat takes Depp from Battersea, up the river to Greenwhich, where cast and crew are shooting Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides.

“Johnny chose to charter a boat for the week because it’s the easiest and quickest way to get there,” says an anonymous source from the set. “He’s been flying in from his home in France some mornings and hopping on the yacht at Battersea. He’s been enjoying the views from the water.”

If it sounds as though the actor is holding his role as Captain Jack Sparrow a bit too close to heart, that just might be the case. Contact Music quotes Depp as saying that he often feels a great attachment to the roles he plays.

“Sometimes you fall in love with who you’re playing,” Depp has said. “As filming winds down, you hear the clock ticking because you know you’re going to leave your character behind and a kind of odd separation anxiety kicks in. You get irritable and just sort of melancholy.”

Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides washes into theatres in May 2011.

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It’s not unusual for similar projects to develop in Hollywood at the same time. Call it a hive mind, call it zeitgeist, call it a trend – the fact is, it happens often.

But three movies featuring the same basic story and characters? Now that’s unusual.

Such is the case, however, with Snow White. Already the main attraction of two interesting projects – one produced by Bret Ratner, the other by Disney – the fairy tale heroine is now set to star in a third production, this one backed by Universal Pictures.

Deadline reports that Universal has just shelled out major bucks for a script called Snow White and the Huntsman. Written by Evan Daugherty with director Rupert Sanders and producer Joe Roth attached, Snow White and the Huntsman is only the latest effort to find a new way to tell the classic story.

Universal bought the script for $1.5 million ($3 million if they actually make it.) The story imagines a new relationship between two of the central characters in the tale. While the Prince is still the love interest, in Daugherty’s take, the Huntsman – who is supposed to kill White in the original, but frees her instead – sticks around, teaching Snow White how to “fight and survive.”

This follows word that Natalie Portman has been circling Ratner’s planned Brothers Grimm: Snow White, which would also feature a radical twist on the story. Disney – who many would argue invented the modern idea of the fairy tale character with Snow White and the Seven Dwarves – has been developing their own new take, called simply Snow White and the Seven.

Now the race is on to see which studio can bring their Snow White back to the castle first.

Eminem may be plotting a return to the silver screen.

After wowing audiences with his performance as a hungry young rapper in 2002’s 8 Mile, the hip hop star has largely stayed away from acting, concentrating instead on his prolific music career.

That may be about to change, however. Production Weekly is reporting that Eminem is in discussions to star in the upcoming drama 360, alongside screen veterans Sir Anthony Hopkins and Frances McDormand.

The movie, based on Arthur Schnitzler’s 1900 play La Ronde, explores themes of sexual mores and class struggle, focusing on a series of sexual encounters between pairs of characters. If it sounds like heady stuff, it is.

Frost/Nixon screenwriter Peter Morgan has already written the script, while Blindness director Fernando Meirelles is set to go to work behind the camera.

Since 8 Mile, Eminem – a.k.a. Marshall Mathers – has limited his on-screen performances to cameo appearances as himself. The Lose Yourself rapper almost stole Judd Apatow’s Funny People with one hilarious scene and has been featured this year on the hit HBO series Entourage.

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Canadian legend of stage and screen Christopher Plummer is the latest big name to sign on to the upcoming Hollywood adaptation of the literary bestseller The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo.

According to The Hollywood Reporter, Plummer, 80, is set to star as Henrik Vanger, the elderly industrialist who hires journalist Mikael Blomkvist to investigate the 40-year-old murder at the centre of the dark tale.

Already cast as Blomkvist is former (and possible future) 007 Daniel Craig. Up-and-comer Rooney Mara will play Lisbeth Salander, the young computer hacker who assists Blomkvist with his investigation.

The movie is the first of three, which will be Hollywood’s adaptation of the Millennium trilogy of novels by late Swedish writer Stieg Larsson. The books have already been adapted into Swedish films.

The new movies will be in English, though set and shot in Sweden.

Plummer most recently starred in the Disney/Pixar animated blockbuster Up, as the villainous Charles Muntz, and as Leo Tolstoy in the acclaimed drama The Last Station.

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