After watching Quentin Tarantino’s brutal slave vengeance tale Django Unchained, I was immediately on board with Christoph Waltz and Samuel L. Jackson starring in many more films together, as their combined talents are a force to be reckoned with. Of course, we'd love to see them once again team up with the Inglourious Basterds director, but instead it looks like their next project together will be David Yates’ upcoming big budget take on Tarzan. Jackson is now in talks to join the delayed Warner Bros. production. Ideally, he’ll be dropping F-bombs as he swings from tree to tree, but I seriously doubt that’ll happen.
Tarzan ran into some trouble earlier this year when budget concerns tipped the studio’s hand, but Variety reports its precisely this delay that has allowed Jackson to potentially join the cast. He was interested in joining the film from the beginning, but scheduling conflicts got in the way. Oddly enough his Django co-star Jamie Foxx was originally in line for the role he is negotiating for, but had to drop out when the delay hit.
Yates and Co. are hoping to get a greenlight from Warner after offering the studio a five-minute pre-visualization video detailing how the film could work. Something tells me casting one of the more popular character actors in Hollywood will help that along as well. The final piece of the puzzle will be casting a Jane for Tarzan, who will be played by Alexander Skarsgard. There have been talks that Australian actress Margot Robbie (The Wolf of Wall Street) is high on the list of actresses, but no official offers have been made yet.
Hot off of filming the pilot for FX’s Middle Eastern drama Tyrant, Yates is looking for a solid feature follow-up to his long run of Harry Potter films. No details on the story have been revealed yet, though the script has passed through many hands, with Adam Cozad (Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit) as the latest to tackle it. My guess is that if the project has managed to attract Waltz, Skarsgard and Jackson, the story must be worth something.
Of course, Jackson also recently starred in the box office megaflop Oldboy remake from Spike Lee, but he’s got a slew of (hopefully) higher quality flicks on the horizon, including the crime thriller Reasonable Doubt, the action-filled Kite remake from Ralph Ziman, and the action comedy Barely Lethal. He’ll also be reprising his role as Nick Fury in all things Marvel for the next century. And who knows how the RoboCop remake will turn out.
I think I’ll be happy as long as Yates’ film doesn’t introduce anything slightly alien, as is the case with the German motion-captured Tarzan animation from Reinhard Kloos. You can cringe at that trailer for that incarnation of the story below, if you’d like.
