One of those hot screenwriting names who's creating a buzz in Hollywood without yet having had one of his films released, Will Staples will follow Mission Impossible 5 with an unnamed project about animal poaching and trafficking. The film is being set up at Warner Bros. with a dream team of Tom Hardy, Leonardo DiCaprio and Tobey Maguire producing and possibly aiming to star.
Staples got his start in videogames (Need For Speed: Rivals, Call Of Duty: Black Ops 3), but hit the coveted Black List with his script King Of Heists, which currently has Jeremy Renner attached. He's also been at work on an action thriller for Ben Affleck and sci-fi adventure Myth for producer Lorenzeo Di Bonaventura.
The poachers project is thought to be a multi-strand narrative along the lines of Traffic, with worldwide threads homing in on different aspects of the illegal animal trade: fur, aphrodisiacs, ivory and so on. Characters include corrupt company executives, jungle and ocean poachers, and others deep in "the underbelly of a global scourge".
It sounds like a potentially tough watch, but it's a passion project for Hardy in particular. He has another, more action-sounding anti-trafficking film in the works at Warners, where he'll play an ex-special forces soldier training locals to fight poachers in Zimbabwe. That one's being written by Up In The Air and Straight Outta Compton's Sheldon Turner. Neither project has a start date so far.