Steven Spielberg may be very much in need of a prestige project after Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull forces a nation of film geeks to re-examine their will to live and the critical community to remember what they didn’t like about him a couple of decades ago, so scheduling his long, long, long awaited Lincoln biopic seems like a good idea.

According to Screen Daily, Spielberg will get to work on his Lincoln movie after he finishes his TinTin film, sometime in early 2009. That would mean that The Trial of the Chicago 7 remains off the deck for now, and Interstellar remains somewhere in the triple A leagues, waiting for its big chance at the majors. This also sets up the Lincoln film as a possible release during the president’s bicentennial year.

One of the things holding back the Lincoln film has been a script, so either Spielberg has a script he likes or the confidence that he’ll get one together in the coming months. I can see why he doesn’t like the current iteration; someone sent me a copy and I think the epigraph that opens the screenplay shows you the unusual bent the script takes:

I freed who?
– Abraham Lincoln, September 23rd, 1862, upon waking up from a three day bender