Lately she's been enjoying a profile-enhancing stint as a judge on American Idol, but a return to acting seems not to be far off. Jennifer Lopez is in talks to take the female lead in Parker opposite Jason Statham.

In recent years it's been rather easy to overlook Lopez's previous screen successes, but Parker if done correctly ought to be a happy reminder to everyone of the Out Of Sight days. Based somewhere in the two-score novels by Donald E. Westlake (written under his Richard Stark pseudonym), it'll see Statham take on the role of the hard-boiled, ruthlessly professional criminal who nevertheless operates by a strict code of honour. The character was previously played on-screen by Lee Marvin, Mel Gibson, Robert Duval and Jim Brown, although curiously, Statham's will be the first to actually be called by the correct name.

Lopez's potential role is Leslie, who finds herself in the middle of a Parker-led heist. That suggests that we're looking at an adaptation of the nineteenth Parker novel, 2000's Flashfire, although nobody's said that so far, so it's possible that Black Swan screenwriter John J. McLaughlin has borrowed and compiled from the whole series.

Taylor Hackford is directing, and with the funding and distribution all slotting into place at Cannes, shooting starts in the autumn.