Ahoy, squirts! Quint here. THR has a rather fascinating story about Hollywood inside baseball that's resulting in two films about the same story being pushed into production.
We all know by now that Steven Spielberg is following up his take on Ernie Cline's Ready Player One with a heavy period drama called THE KIDNAPPING OF EDGARDO MORTARA. Spielberg's done this one-two punch a few times before, most famously with Jurassic Park and Schindler's List.
The news is that Harvey Weinstein is launching a competing Edgardo Mortara project and while Spielberg's has been in the planning stages for quite a while, it looks like Weinstein's project is getting fast-tracked and will beat Spielberg's to production by a couple months.
Crazier still is that this was a project the two were developing together for a while and then Spielberg branched off. Could this be a power move by Weinstein or is he just super passionate about this story of a kidnapped Jewish child brought up Catholic by the Church? The former makes for a more salacious story, but the latter is true as well. This is a project Weinstein has been working on for years, afterall.
The THR story says that Weinstein is courting Robert DeNiro to play Pope Pius IX, a role which is going to Mark Rylance in Spielberg's film. Everest and 2 Guns director Baltasar Kormakur is in talks to helm and The Last King of Scotland's Jeremy Brock is penning the script.
The silver lining here is that it is rumored that Weinstein's project wouldn't be focusing on the same time in Mortara's life as Spielberg's, which could mean that we essentially get a symbiotic set of films.
Anyway, I thought it was an interesting development. What do you folks think?
-Eric Vespe
”Quint”
quint@aintitcool.com
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