He's no stranger to action cinema, having written The Transporter, Taken and, most recently, Colombiana. Robert Mark Kamen will continue to adhere to type for the forseeable, since he's just signed on to write The Sword, adapted from Stephen Hunter's novel The 47th Samurai.

The 2007 novel is the fourth in Hunter's series about ex-military sniper Bob Lee Swagger, who just keeps getting pulled out of retirement for new adventures. This one sees Swagger unwittingly recovering a priceless samurai sword while undertaking some family-based resarch on the battle of Iwo Jima. When he returns it to its rightful owner, it's immediately stolen and its recipient murdered. Swagger investigates, getting embroiled with ancient samurai culture and into trouble with the rather more modern Japanese yakuza.

Swagger's adventures have reached the screen once before, in the form of Antoine Fuqua's Shooter, which was adapted from the first novel in the series, Point Of Impact. That was an in-house Paramount project however, while The Sword is being developed by New Regency, which means that this isn't necessarily going to function as a sequel, and we won't necessarily see Mark Wahlberg back in the lead.

In fact, if Paramount still hold any of their rights from 2007, New Regency may even have to re-name the hero (Die Hard's John McClane, in a similar situation, would have been called Joe Leland if Frank Sinatra hadn't already played that character in another Roderick Thorpe adaptation, The Detective, in 1968). Still, maybe there's a deal to be done...

There's no other news forthcoming at the moment, beyond Kamen's involvement and the fact that Lorenzo Di Bonaventura (also behind Shooter) is producing. As always, we'll bring you more news as we get it.