While Ben Wheatley has largely developed his own scripts alongside wife/writer Amy Jump, he has dabbled in adaptation with High-Rise, which starred one Thomas Hiddleston. If deals come together, Wheatley could be working on a movie based on comic book series Hard Boiled, and Hiddleston is being eyed as the likely star.
Warner Bros. is deep in negotiations for the rights to the title, which was created by Frank Miller and Geoff Darrow. The series, which ran between 1990 and 1992, is set in a dystopian, near-future Los Angeles where seemingly average insurance investigator Carl Seitz discovers that he's really Nixon, a homicidal cyborg tax collector – or is it Nixon discovering he's actually Carl? Either way, he becomes the last hope for an enslaved race of robots.
It's chewy material that sounds like a story Wheatley could bring something fresh to, but right now this is all still floating in the rumoursphere as there are no finished deals, and adaptations have been attempted before. Still: Wheatley and Hiddleston getting the gang back together? We'd be happy to watch whatever they do.
Wheatley's next film, Free Fire, is out on 31 March.