Russell Crowe has just attached himself to star in a remake of the 80s television series The Equalizer. Crowe will be playing Robert McCall, a retired intelligence agent helping people as a way to atone for some of the unspecified bad things he did in his past.
There’s no script yet, so we don’t know if this will be an origin story for the McCall character in the way that last weekend’s A-Team movie supplied an origin story for its leads or if the film will just jump right in on McCall coming to the aid of those in need.Personally, I hope that they don’t invent a detailed backstory for McCall. Part of the appeal of the character was his shadowy origins. It is probably something we don’t need to demystify.
There’s also no studio lined up to actually make the film. Producer Mace Neufeld had been developing the film over at the Weinstein Company for a while, but they have apparently parted ways. The LA Times is reporting that Neufeld and production company Escape Artists, the folks behind the remake of The Taking Of Pelham 1-2-3 and the horrible Will Smith drama Seven Pounds, have been shopping the project around Hollywood and a few studios have expressed interest.
Like any actor, Crowe is attached to a couple of different projects at any one time, but right now the only work that looks solid for him in the immediate future is the lead in the Paul Haggis-helmed thriller The Next Three Days, where he’ll play a man whose wife is wrongly accused of murder.
