On the surface, a Sarah Jessica Parker film and a Kate Beckinsale film couldn't be any more different, since Sarah Jessica Parker makes shiny-haired romantic comedies and Kate Beckinsale mainly has sex with werewolves.

However, when Sarah Jessica Parker dropped out of just-announced thriller Vacancy, producers looked no further than Kate Beckinsale. Sarah Jessica Parker dropped out of Vacancy for "personal reasons," although we'd guess that maybe she realised what the film is about and personally thought starring in a generic lameo horror thriller would end her career.

You can't move for identikit horror thrillers these days, can you? If you're not watching a man dig a key out from behind his eye in Saw, Saw 2 or the upcoming Saw 3, you're watching a man blowtorch a Japanese girl's eye off in Hostel or the upcoming Hostel 2 and just about the last thing any of us want to see is another gratuitously disturbing shocker. Tell that to Screen Gems, which has just announced Vacancy, a horror thriller about a couple who go to a motel room and then discover that it's full of videocameras and then realise that the owner of the motel is making a snuff film all about them and then probably stab him through the throat with a trouser press in a needlessly gory way. Probably.

Anyway, up until very recently Vacancy was set to star Sarah Jessica Parker as the screaming victim, albeit a screaming victim with unusually well-conditioned hair. However, thanks to 'personal reasons' – possibly having to look after Matthew Broderick's knackered collarbone – Sarah Jessica Parker has left Vacancy, to be replaced with Underworld's Kate Beckinsdale, everyone's favourite Shakespearean actress turned geek-pleasing, catsuit-wearing vampire exploder. Nobody knows if the appointment of Kate Beckinsdale will require Vacancy to go through any rewrites so that, say, Kate Beckinsale gets to basejump off the motel  – now a skyscraper – roof while simultaneously firing six bazookas at a cloud of a million evil winged apemonsters and taking her top off for no reason at all.

However, regardless of the Vacancy female lead, one thing's for sure; for as long as the male half of the trapped Vacancy character will be played by Luke Wilson, just about anyone who goes to see Vacancy will instinctively root for the murderous motel owner.

Read more:

Beckinsdale Fills Vacancy In Motel Thriller – Reuters

[story by Stuart Heritage]