At this rate the long-rumored sequel to The Big Lebowski may never happen, but that doesn’t mean Joel and Ethan Coen — the writer/director brother team behind it and other cinematic classics — aren’t keeping busy. After all, the pair recently crafted an Easy Rider-esque Super Bowl LI commercial for Mercedes-Benz and last year’s Hail, Caesar! still deserves your eyeballs if you haven’t watched it already. That, and they just landed the job of revising the script for the upcoming Scarface reboot starring Rogue One‘s Diego Luna.
According to Variety, Universal Pictures hired the pair to polish the existing script for the remake — itself a remake of Howard Hawks’ 1932 classic — since director Antoine Fuqua left the project after circling it last summer. Luna’s casting as Tony Montana, the role first made famous by Al Pacino in the 1983 classic written by Oliver Stone and directed by Brian De Palma, was announced at the same time as Fuqua’s departure. As for the Coens’ attachment to the remake, so far it seems they’re only serving as additional screenwriters.
This isn’t the first time the Coen brothers have hitched onto a film project without sitting in the director’s chair directors’ chairs. As Variety points out, both Steven Spielberg’s Bridge of Spies and Angelina Jolie’s Unbroken were handed over to Joel and Ethan for tweaking before either project managed to escape their pre-production phases. Yet their relative closeness to Scarface begs the question — what would the Coens’ version of the classic crime drama look like if they were given the reigns?
Or to rephrase the question, who would John Goodman and Frances McDormand play?
(Via Variety)
