Well that didn’t take long! A few weeks ago, Renn enlightened us to the tasty fact that Cormac McCarthy has written a spec script and sold it to the producers of The Road. Here’s a refresher on the plot…
The protagonist in The Counselor is a respected lawyer who thinks he can dip a toe in to the drug business without getting sucked down. It is a bad decision and he tries his best to survive it and get out of a desperate situation.
At the time, many of us wondered what would become of this project. In a perfect world, something like this gets put together rather quickly with a crack team behind it, but we all know Hollywood rarely works that way. Well, it looks like like the producers didn’t waste anytime and that rare “perfect world” scenario is coming to pass. McCarthy enthusiast* Ridley Scott is currently in talks to direct the project, with the intention of it being his immediate follow-up to this summer’s Prometheus.
For the longest time it looked like Ridley’s next would be an historical biopic of Gertrude Bell (with Angelina Jolie attached to star) or possibly an adaptation of The Wolf of Wall Street**, but it seems both have fallen by the wayside in favor of this. Personally, I think he traded up big time. Scott’s Blade Runner follow-up is still a few years off and this film seems like a perfect project for Ridley to make in the meantime.
Given Scott’s penchant for keeping busy, I fully expect The Counselor to hit theaters sometime in 2013 if the deal goes through.
Source | Deadline
* – Scott has long desired to direct an adaptation of McCarthy’s western Blood Meridian, but has had no such luck to date. For awhile it looked like someone else might succeed where he failed, but it looks like the rights have once again expired. Perhaps he can convince McCarthy to pen an adaptation himself while he’s doing The Counselor?
** – This project confuses the hell out of me. At this point, the only thing for certain about The Wolf of Wall Street is that if it gets made it will probably star Leonardo DiCaprio and it will be produced by Ridley Scott and Martin Scorsese. As far as who will end up directing, the two maestros keep flip-flopping between one another.