One of the hottest spec scripts in the first quarter of this year was Aaron Guzikowski's Prisoners. It provoked a flurry of interest among production companies, directors and potential stars, until it eventually landed at Alcon, who seem to have got the gig by demonstrating they could get it into production quickly.
Names like Mark Wahlberg, Christian Bale and Bryan Singer were mentioned, but the slightly downsized project is now moving ahead with Training Day's Antoine Fuqua in negotiations to direct. He'll have to make his mind up quickly, since the project is being fast tracked to go before cameras at the very beginning of next year.
The story involves a father taking the law into his own hands and kidnapping the man he believes to be responsible for the disappearance of his daughter and her best friend. THR says the script has drawn comparison to both Taken and Mystic River (which is a bit like comparing a Vietnam film to First Blood 2 and The Deer Hunter), so let's just say it's a vigilante / revenge thriller, the tone of which is yet to be thrashed out.
Fuqua's CV (Training Day, Tears of the Sun, The Replacement Killers, King Arthur) has covered both flashy action and heavyweight (or bombastic, if you're unconvinced) drama: sometimes both at the same time, so that might give us some idea of the direction this is going.
And he directed Shooter, so perhaps Marky Mark is still in the running for this after all.