Over the summer we learned that Robert Downey Jr's production company had picked up development on a "lost" Steve McQueen film. The project now has a new writer, with Deadline reporting that Anthony Peckham is currently knocking Yucatan into new shapes.

Yucatan was a film that Steve McQueen was actively developing in the late 1960s, but he never got it going before his untimely death in 1980. He filled over 1500 pages in a dozen notebooks, with script notes and storyboards detailing an underwater heist thriller. He'd have played the lead role of "a renegade deep sea salvage expert", hired to uncover a mysterious treasure horde buried deep underwater in the titular Mayan ruins. 

Warners have wanted to get the project up and running again since it was unearthed by McQueen's sons in 2005, and as a star vehicle for the post-Iron Man Downey, it looks now to be steaming ahead. With McQueen's script in no workable state, however, it's no surprise that Team Downey have chosen Anthony Peckham to crack it (for a reported seven figure payday). He co-wrote Sherlock Holmes after all, which rather worked out for Downey, but he's also recently scripted Invictus for Clint Eastwood, and he's had a hand in the in-development new Jack Ryan movie, and Deep Sea Cowboys (about the rescue of a capsized cargo ship). So he even has the requisite ocean experience - at least on paper.

Team Downey is producing Yucatan along with Dan Lin. With the screenplay sorted, next they'll need a director...