Of course we love
Robert Downey, Jr. It's kind of required. He
is Tony Stark now, after all, as well as a goofy (and yes, we admit it,
fun) alternate-universe Sherlock Holmes. But he doesn't have to be
everybody, y'know? So maybe it's not such a bad thing that Downey has announced that he's passing up the starring role in
Jon Favreau's
other big project (other than
Iron Man 2, that is) -- the big, bad movie adaptation of
Cowboys & Aliens.
Some names are concepts in themselves, and some are just too good to pass up. Pride & Prejudice & Zombies. Abe Lincoln, Vampire Hunter. And yes, Cowboys and Aliens. (In fact, the relative provenance of this whole project is kind of interesting. Let's see if we have this right: Cowboys & Aliens was actually created by Platinum Studios’ Scott Mitchell Rosenberg; Fred Van Lente and Andrew Foley wrote it, and artists Dennis Calero and Luciano Lima illustrated, the original graphic novel of the same name in 2006. And there's no telling how close the screenplay sticks to that story. This is clearly all about the High Concept, baby.)
In any event, it's bound to be good. We hope. It's certainly getting the first-class treatment: a screenplay from the out-and-out amazing team of Robert Orci and Alex Kurtzman (Star Trek, Transformers, Xena, Fringe, and everything else even moderately cool in the decade gone by), along with Damon Lindelof, who wrote and co-produced a ton of Lost episodes, with the AA+ team of producers on top: Brian Grazer, Ron Howard, Stephen Spielberg and the aforementioned hot-as-a-repulsor-ray actor/director Jon Favreau. In retrospect, Downey is almost superfluous -- this is already the gold standard, deal-wise And Downey already has two major-league franchises to exploit; maybe it's time he gave somebody else a chance. Which makes it even more appropriate that he's giving this up to do a (rumored, potential, blah blah blah) Sherlock Holmes sequel.
This all just happened, so any speculation about who will be replacing Downey as the cowboy-alien fighter Zeke Jackson (love that name!) is way-way premature. And now there are rumors the whole project will be filmed in 3-D, a pretty inevitable thought given the Avalanche of interest in the tech (Get it? It's kind of a pun.) Either way, it's still scheduled to be one of the biggies for Summer 2011, so things had better start happening pretty quickly. We'll keep an eye out ...
