Nicolas Cage is keeping busy at the moment: with Kick-Ass and The Sorceror's Apprentice in the bag, Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans doing the festival rounds and 3D action film Drive Angry already lined up. But for the 5 minutes he's got spare in the meantime, he's signed on to star in The Hungry Rabbit Jumps, a vigilante thriller to be directed by Roger Donaldson.
Based on a script by Robert Tannen (gambling drama Even Money), Cage will play a man whose wife is the victim of a violent crime, who becomes involved in an underground vigilante organisation as he tries to deal with the aftermath. Producer Jim Stern described the plot to The Hollywood Reporter, saying, "In the best of the Hitchcockian tradition, we've got a character who's offered the chance for vengeance and he finds himself in over his head."
The rest remains under wraps, but we'll be interested to see if the title survives the journey to the screen. On one hand, this comes from the director of the excellent but badly monikered The World's Fastest Indian, so he has form in going for weird names; on the other Donaldson may now be wary of complicated and obscure titles after that film did less well than it deserved to do.
Tobey Maguire's Maguire Entertainment is producing, although the Spider-Man star is not expected to take a role, and shooting's due to start and finish before Cage begins work on Drive Angry in April.