The Toronto Film Festival gets underway tomorrow but the first pre-sale deals are already having their 'i's dotted and 't's crossed. One such, according to Screen Daily’s sources, has Johnny Depp signing up for true-life crime story Labyrinth.
Nothing whatever to do with the Goblin King, this Labyrinth is the story of LAPD officer Russell Poole. The LA ‘tec was assigned to the case of a pair of high-profile assassinations – Tupac Shakur and Biggie Smalls – in the late '90s, but ended up stumbling upon a whole different kind of criminal activity. Poole’s shoe-rubber-burning relentlessness turned up corruption on a serious scale within the LAPD.
Johnny Depp has got deep into character work in recent years, often burying himself under layers of prosthetics and flamboyant costumes, but this one could see him stripping back to the brass tacks. It’s got The Infiltrator’s Brad Furman returning to the crime thriller genre as director.
Confusingly, there’s also a remake of Jim Henson’s cult kids classic in the development churn at the moment. Yes, we’re a script mix-up from Depp playing Jareth (or potentially one, even bigger script mix-up from playing Jennifer Connelly’s character).
This one has a potential start date of early 2017, with Good Films, the production house behind The Infiltrator and Good, pulling it together.