Back in 2008 it seemed all set to go ahead with the Lars and the Real Girl team of Ryan Gosling and Craig Gillespie, but after a couple more years thrashing around in development, the latest customers at The Dallas Buyers Club are Matthew McConaughey and director Jean Marc Vallee.
It's one of those projects that's really struggled to get going, with any number of stars and directors and writers attached at some point before giving up and moving on. Before Gosling, Brad Pitt was interested; Marc Forster might have directed it at one time; Guillermo Ariaga wrote a draft of the script a decade ago.
The constant throughout all those changes though has been production company Strike Entertainment, who are now putting The Dallas Buyers Club together as an indie, having lost Universal's patronage.
Why so difficult? Possibly something to do with its AIDS-related subject matter, still apt to make a studio squeamish. It's the story of Texan electrician Ron Woodroof, who was given six months to live by doctors in 1986, but bought himself six more years by smuggling illegal medicines into the US, distributing them to other AIDS sufferers by the way.
"It's not the sort of movie studios are throwing money at these days," McConaughey opined to the LA Times, but he's confident that it's "a great script and a great story, and I think it can be a great movie."