EW.com — The cast of The Martian is getting even starrier: EW has exclusively confirmed that Chiwetel Ejiofor, Sebastian Stan, and Mackenzie Davis are the latest to join in director Ridley Scott’s The Martian, due in theaters November 2015. They join previously announced cast members Matt Damon, Jessica Chastain, Kristen Wiig, Kate Mara, Sean Bean, Donald Glover, Michael Pena and Jeff Daniels.

The Martian, adapted from the best-selling novel by Andy Weir, is about Mark Watney (Damon), an astronaut who gets left behind on Mars when his crew mistakenly believes him dead. “It’s quintessential Robinson Crusoe,” Ridley Scott tells EW. Drew Goddard (World War Z) penned the screenplay, and Damon and the rest of the cast quickly jumped aboard. “This is one of those movies that’s had a blessed life,” says producer Simon Kinberg. “Every actor is doing it for significantly less than their normal fee. It’s a real labor of love.”

Production begins in November in Budapest.

HollywoodReporter.com — Sony Pictures Worldwide Acquisitions has picked up The Bronze, a comedy starring and co-written by The Big Bang Theory actress Melissa Rauch.

Jay and Mark Duplass, the brothers behind comedies such as Jeff, Who Lives at Home and Cyrus, are exec producing the indie, the cast of which also includes Gary Cole, Silicon Valley star Thomas Middleditch, Captain America: The Winter Soldier actor Sebastian Stan, Saturday Night Live’s Cecily Strong and Haley Lu Richardson.

The movie is currently shooting in Ohio under the direction of Bryan Buckley, the award-winning commercial director known for his numerous Super Bowl spots.

Tracking-Board.com — Sebastian Stan will star in the indie sci-fi film ARQ. Written by Tony Elliott and directed by Craig David Wallace, the film follows an engineer who has survived the collapse of civilization, and is now reliving the last day of his life over and over again. Sarah Timmons and Christina Piovesan are producing and Peter Block is executive producing for Corvid Pictures.

“ARQ” is the first feature film from Elliott, and depending on shooting and release dates, will be either the first or second from Wallace. Elliott’s previous work has been as a story editor and writer for BBC America’s “Orphan Black,” while Wallace created and executive produced the Canadian horror comedy series “Todd & the Book of Pure Evil” (a project which he worked on with Corvid Pictures). Of course, writers and directors often change tonally between projects–just look at Steven Soderbergh–but based on what there is of Wallace and Elliott’s previous work, I think it’s safe to say that “ARQ” will not be aiming for understated.

The real draw of the film is Stan, whose career is on an upward slope at the moment, between his roles as Bucky Barnes in the two “Captain America” movies and the Mad Hatter in “Once Upon a Time.” Others may remember him as the troubled son of the Secretary of State in USA’s Sigourney Weaver-led miniseries “Political Animals.” Or, if you’ve got really esoteric taste, you might recognize him from NBC’s predictably short-lived series “Kings.” Basically, Stan has made a career of playing endearingly troubled, slightly crazed characters–which seems like a pretty good fit for a post-apocalyptic engineer stuck in a “Groundhog’s Day” loop.

Given that the main character is an engineer, it seems likely that ARQ stands for “automatic repeat request,” a data transmission method by which a query is sent out repeatedly until an acknowledgement is received from the recipient. As Wikipedia’s fantastic “List of films featuring time loops” page demonstrates, we’re nowhere near done riffing on the “Groundhog Day” concept, so it should be interesting to see how “ARQ” measures up to films like “Edge of Tomorrow.”