Matthew McConaughey won an Oscar for playing a real-life person in Dallas Buyers Club, so you can see why he might be attracted to a role which will see him leading another true-life tale. He's now in the process of making a deal to star in The Lost Bus, with Paul Greengrass similarly locking in an agreement to direct.
The Lost Bus has an interesting development history –– Jamie Lee Curtis heard Lizzie Johnson talking up her book Paradise: One Town’s Struggle To Survive An American Wildfire, about the deadly 2018 Camp fire in California, on a radio show. Inspired by the story of a bus driver and teacher who guided a group of students to safety through a raging fire in a school bus, she enquired about the rights via her Comet Films company. She brought the project to Blumhouse, where Comet has a first-look deal and producer Jason Blum saw the chance for the company to work on a non-horror movie (though we can see it being terrifying if you're rightfully afraid of fire).
The pair hired Out Of The Furnace's Brad Ingelsby to adapt the book into a script, and in early 2023 got it in front of Greengrass. He agreed to jump aboard, but any forward motion was delayed by last year's strikes. Now it's back — with Apple Original Films looking to pick it up for distribution — and McConaughey is zeroing in on the role of the driver.
Whether Curtis appears on screen as well as producing remains to seen, but this should be rolling into production later this year.