Now this is good news to kick off the weekend – Curtis Hanson is in negotiations with Disney to direct the long-awaited, high-concept thriller, Gemini Man.
How long-awaited, we hear you cry. Well, let’s put it this way: in 2003, Empire named the screenplay as one of the twelve greatest unproduced scripts in Hollywood. By then, it had already been rattling around for several years. And, when it was first mooted as a viable project, Sean Connery or Mel Gibson were reportedly in the running to star.
Now, of course, Gibson isn’t quite the box office draw he was, while Connery is retired, so it seems likely that Hanson will be looking elsewhere for the big name required to fill the role of a retired NSA agent who finds himself the target of an assassin, who turns out to be a younger, faster, deadlier clone of himself.
See what we mean about high-concept? And, of course, due to the technology involved in having the movie’s star also play the younger clone, highly expensive. Which goes some way towards explaining why it’s taken over a decade, and several screenwriters including original scribe Darren Lemke, Jonathan Hensleigh and now David Benioff, to get this even remotely close to going into production.
But, as the likes of The Curious Case Of Benjamin Button have shown, age is no longer a barrier to CG, and so Gemini Man is coming together rather rapidly, for a possible 2010 release.
If Hanson does sign on, it’ll be his biggest film to date, and his first action movie (**The River Wild **doesn’t really count). Frankly, after his last film, Lucky You, flopped, he needs a hit; with the right casting (Clooney or Bruce Willis spring to mind), Gemini Man could well be it.
Jerry Bruckheimer will produce the movie for Disney; Mike Stenson, Chad Oman and Don Murphy will executive produce.