He is no longer headed to Guillermo del Toro’s haunted house thriller Crimson Peak, but it seems Benedict Cumberbatch still has a thing for films with lofty titles. He’s now attached to indie thriller **Blood Mountain.
Mongol director Sergei Bodrov is hoping that attaching Sir Sherlock of Holmes’ name to the film will bring the investors and distributors scurrying when producers Lawrence Bender, Nicola Horlick and James Gibb take the proect to the European Film Market in Berlin.
Jonathan W. Stokes and John Romano have written the script, which finds a military contractor working with a special forces team in a foreign land when the troops are ambushed and offed during a covert raid. He’s forced to escort one of the world’s most wanted terrorists across hostile terrain to bring him to justice. Naturally, there’s a bounty on both of their heads, and with insurgents and rival mercenaries on their trail, they have to figure out how to work together to fight even more dangerous enemies. As they do so, love blossoms and… Actually, we made that bit up.
Bodrov, who also made troubled Jeff Bridges fantasy film Seventh Son (which has been shoved back on the release calendar once again to 2015) is scheduled to begin filming in Morocco this April. Cumberbatch has most recently worked on Alan Turing drama The Imitation Game and will be heard once more as the voice of Smaug (and the Necromancer) in The Hobbit: There And Back Again, out on December 19.