Jamie Foxx is not necessarily someone we would have expected to be slipping into Lincoln green and running around a forest. But he'll do just that for Robin Hood: Origins, for which he's snagged the key role of Little John.
Don't go expecting him to fill the role of cranky mentor to Taron Egerton's Robin, right away though – he's apparently a battled hardened and war weary veteran of the Crusades, where he fought on the opposite side to Hood, and enters the story distrustful of our hero. He'll eventually find his way to working alongside the young man however, in a story that is being described as the Robin Hood version of the Dark Knight trilogy. Robin returns to Sherwood Forest and its surrounding environs to find corruption and crime rife and forms his traditional band of outlaws to start shifting the balance for the forces of good. Which, if we're honest, sounds much like your common or garden Robin Hood story.
Peaky Blinders regular director Otto Bathurst is the man charged with injecting the grit into this one, working from a script by Joby Harold, who hatched the Knights Of The Round Table series of films that Guy Ritchie is looking to kick off via next year's King Arthur. Eve Hewson has the role of Maid Marian for the Hood movie, which is scheduled to roll its cameras once Egerton has finished his stint on the Kingsman sequel and is available to work again.
Foxx, last seen in Annie, will appear in thriller Sleepless Night and is part of the cast for Edgar Wright's latest, Baby Driver.