Late last month we reported Ryan Gosling and Sean Penn were circling Zombieland director Ruben Fleischer‘s next film. The helmer has the comedy 30 Minutes or Less hitting this summer (and a trailer rumored for today), but he has something quite different for his next project. He will direct Gangster Squad from the hot Will Beall script at Warner Bros.
Deadline now brings the news that Penn and Gosling are in negotiations for the main roles and Josh Brolin is in talks to play a cop next to Gosling, who both hunt down Penn as Los Angeles mob kingpin Mickey Cohen. We previously reported that Mickey C’s exploits have been touched on in films like the Warren Beatty-starring Bugsy and the character appears briefly in L.A. Confidential.
Cohen started out as a Chicago mob enforcer and was an associate of Al Capone. Cohen worked for an associate of Meyer Lansky in Cleveland before moving to Las Vegas and helping Benjamin “Bugsy” Siegel set up the Flamingo casino, which began the Gangster Era of Vegas. Cohen eventually became king of the L.A. rackets, and for a while sold more newspapers than anyone else in the United States. The film is based on a series of article written by Paul Lieberman and will follow the real-life story of a squad of cops who are charged with locking Cohen up for good.
This sounds like a fantastic line-up if all three players get attached and it is interesting to see Fleischer’s young career skyrocket with such a high profile project. We’ll see if he further proves himself in 30 Minutes or Less starring Jesse Eisenberg,Danny McBride, Aziz Ansari, Nick Swardson and Michael Peña, hitting theaters this August. Josh Brolin is currently filming Men In Black III with nothing else confirmed on the horizon.
What do you think about this line-up for Gangster Squad?