Some of Hollywood’s brightest are lining up some really interesting projects this week. We’ve got two doses of sci-fi goodness plus the next Alexander Payne movie attaching big names in today’s Casting Bites.

Bradley Cooper continues his hot streak, signing on to star in the Neil Burger-directed thriller Dark Fields. Based on the book by Alan Glynn, the film was originally set to star Shia LaBeouf before Cooper came aboard. It centers on a struggling writer whose life takes a sudden and sharp upswing when he chances across a top-secret pharmaceutical drug that increases intelligence. It isn’t long before he discovers that the drug has dangerous side effects, though, including the phenomenon of “trip-switching” which causes him to experience time in a stop-motion fashion. To make things worse, he also finds himself being pursued by shadowy antagonists. Leslie Dixon wrote the script, which is said to be in the vein of Fight Club and The Game.

Next up is George Clooney, who is in talks to topline Alexander Payne’s The Descendants. If you’ll recall, the film centers on a wealthy Hawaiian landowner who takes his two daughters with him in search of his wife’s lover after she falls into an irreversible coma. The film will mark Payne’s first feature since 2004’s Sideways, and is based on the debut novel of Kaui Hart Hemmings.

Jake Gyllenhaal is looking to star in the sci-fi thriller Source Code. Duncan Jones, hot off the success of Moon, will direct the picture. This puts Mute, his futuristic sci-fi thriller, on hold for the time being, though Source Code certainly sounds intriguing enough. The film centers on a soldier who wakes up in the body of a New Jersey commuter. He discovers a bomb on the train only to have it detonate, killing him and everyone else onboard. He wakes up again in an isolation chamber and realizes he’s being put through a simulation of a real event to discover who the bomber was, thus beginning his many attempts to discover the truth and possibly change a bit of history. It’s got echoes of Twelve Monkeys and Deja Vu from the sound of it, and I’m excited to see what Jones does with it. Ben Ripley wrote the original draft, and Billy Ray has done the most recent revisions.

Tags: Alexander Payne, Ben Ripley, Billy Ray, Bradley Cooper, Dark Fields, Duncan Jones, George Clooney, Jake Gyllenhaal, Leslie Dixon, Neil Burger, Source Code, The Descendants