Ridley Scott’s career has been in sort of a downward spiral for awhile now, but he’s taking a volume shooter approach to his future reputation as a director. If he makes enough movies, maybe one of them will be good. He already has four more upcoming movies in various stages of production, and now Variety says he’s adding a fourth.
Fox 2000 has optioned an unpublished novel called “Child 44” for Ridley to direct as a feature. It is not in fact the polygamist version of Cheaper by the Dozen, but instead it’s about a secret police officer framed for treason. Rather than stick around for the execution, he ends up on the run with his estranged wife, stumbles on a series of child murders, and sets about solving them even at risk of being captured.
Before he does Child 44, Ridley is expected to make a political drama about intelligence gathering and terrorism called Penetration (Ridley you're making critics' jobs too easy with that title). Later this year he’s releasing a drug smuggling movie called American Gangster and he also has Body of Lies and Blood Meridian in varying stages of pre-production. When last you saw Ridley, he was making the rather horrible Russell Crowe Under the Tuscan Sun knockoff A Good Year. Before that it was the disastrous epic Kingdom of Heaven. Being a Ridley Scott fan has started to hurt.
