Nope, he's not playing Leontes or Polixenes, or covering David Essex songs with his band is based on the magic realist novel by Mark Helprin, and marks the directorial debut of screenwriter Akiva Goldsman.
Set in a fairytale, fantastical, turn-of-the-century New York, the book involves a love story between orphaned Irish burglar Peter Lake and the dying Beverly Penn, inhabitant of an upper-West-Side mansion he targets. Which goes little way to describing a novel that involves vision quests, New York street gangs, guardian angel flying white horses and messianic self-sacrifice. Lake also disappears for a number of years, hence the Shakespeare-riffing title. Nobody gets pursued by a bear though.
Rather than Lake, THR's story says that Crowe is "loosely attached" to play "the villain" in the film. Nothing is quite that clear-cut in the novel, but we're guessing the antagonist they're talking about is Jackson Mead, a master bridge builder planning to create a structure so incredible that it will catch the eye of God and cause the end of the world.
Goldsman was prompted to make A Winter's Tale his first foray behind the camera by its fantastical elements and by its eulogising of his native New York. The story looks to be seducing others too: Tom Hiddleston and Benjamin Walker are apparently in the running for the role of Lake, while Bella Heathcote, Elizabeth Olson, Gabrielle Wilde and Sarah Gadon have all attended "chemistry reads" for the part of Penn.
It's not quite all systems go though, as Warners seem keen to find a third-party partner to help stump up the budget, estimated at $75m back at the start of this year. That's quite a lot for a project as strange as this one, so that eventual cast will be part of putting together as strong a package as possible to attract investors...