Cannonballs are not usually noted for their bounciness. But the attempt to make a new Cannonball Run movie has been hopping from one filmmaker to another for years, never quite settling despite Warner Bros' best efforts. Doug Liman is the latest director in talks to take it on.
Hinging on the concept of a mad cross-country car race, the Cannonball Run films (which screeched into cinemas in 1981, 1984 and 1989 from a variety of studios) featured sprawling casts of actors, but were primarily driven – for the first two, at least – by Burt Reynolds' cocky J.J. McClure and Dom DeLuise's luckless Victor Prinzim. Based on real-life races, the films found the competitors trying anything to win.
Guy Ritchie's name floated about back around 2011, while Etan Cohen and more recently, Central Intelligence's Rawson Thurber have both been attached to varying degrees, with Thomas Lennon and Robert Ben Garant writing up the latest script draft. Liman, if he does make a deal to work on the movie, will be going off of their version, but bringing in his own writer to take a crack. And it'll have to wait regardless – he's busy on Chaos Walking and then might finally make Live Die Repeat And Repeat, the much-mooted Edge Of Tomorrow sequel.
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