This feels like a story we already reported, but Michael Fassbender has just updated his status from "strongly rumoured" to "confirmed" as the star of The Counsellor. Cormac McCarthy's original screenplay is being directed by Ridley Scott.

The film is coming together amazingly quickly. McCarthy (author of No Country For Old Men, The Road and All The Pretty Horses) delivered his screenplay to his surprised publishers in January, and Scott was signed as director only weeks later.

The story involves a successful lawyer who thinks he's clever enough to exploit the system by moonlighting in the drug business, but finds himself quickly dragged into a world of pain. Naysayers are starting to mutter that that sounds rather like Breaking Bad, but producer Steven Schwartz is understandably enthusiastic: "Since McCarthy himself wrote the script, we get his own muscular prose directly, with his sexual obsessions. It’s a masculine world into which, unusually, two women intrude to play leading roles. McCarthy’s wit and humour in the dialogue make the nightmare even scarier. This may be one of McCarthy’s most disturbing and powerful works.”

Those two female leads will be Hollywood's next most contested roles, we'd imagine. And there's also the matter of casting the villain. Deadline's Mike Fleming says he's hearing rumours of Jeremy Renner, Bradley Cooper or Brad Pitt, but presumably those names come up for practically every current project, and nobody is yet remotely confirmed.

True to The Counsellor's brisk form though, shooting starts at the beginning of May, so we should hear further updates soon enough...