Last week when Russell Crowe dropped out of Baz Luhrmann’s unnamed Australian period epic, the question was who can fill his shoes? It turns out that the new star brings his own footwear – and they’re tap shoes. Yes, the Aussie actor who has managed to maintain the schizophrenic public image of feral mutant killing machine/Broadway song and dance man, Hugh Jackman, will be starring.
Jackman has been really busting his ass lately, taking advantage of his level of buzz to move himself forward on the Hollywood food chain to the point where he is a suitable replacement for Crowe. His X-Men: The Last Stand had a record-setting weekend, and he’s following that up this year with a role in the next Woody Allen film, Scoop, Christopher Nolan’s magicians in conflict movie The Prestige, and a possible Oscar-snatching role in Darren Aronofsky’s new sci-fi classic The Fountain. And isn’t it amazing how no one holds Van Helsing against him?
With this announcement comes new information about the plot of the movie, ripped straight from the trades!
[A] romantic action-adventure set in northern Australia prior to World War II, centers on an English aristocrat (Nicole Kidman) who inherits a ranch the size of Maryland. When English cattle barons plot to take her land, she reluctantly joins forces with a rough-hewn cattle driver (Jackman) to drive 2,000 head of cattle across hundreds of miles of the country’s most unforgiving land, only to still face the bombing of Darwin, Australia, by the Japanese forces that had attacked Pearl Harbor only months earlier.
Now that Luhrmann and Jackman have come together, the idea of an all-singing, all-dancing Wolverine movie just became that much more likely.