Aside from terrorizing Gotham, it looks like we found another passion for The Dark Knight Rises star Tom Hardy: bringing awareness to the practice of animal trafficking. We got the news this past summer that Leonardo DiCaprio, Tobey Maguire and Hardy were coming together to develop a film about anti-poaching, said to be in the style of Steven Soderbergh‘s Traffic, but Deadline now has an update on the project, along with another.
Things are moving forward with the film at Warner Bros. — along with all of the aforementioned stars’ own production companies — but that’s not all that is planned. While the trio consider onscreen roles in that film (although no writer is attached yet), Hardy is also developing a second project on the issue, with the same production companies.
This one wold certainly give Hardy a leading role and Up In The Air‘s Sheldon Turner is already working hard on the screenplay. This film, seemingly more straightforward than the aforementioned one, would follow Hardy as a “former special forces soldier who signs on with a friend to work in the bush, training rangers to fight off the poachers decimating the rhino and elephant populations in Zimbabwe. The soldier falls in love with the land, and the animals he is trying to save.”
In the last update on the initial project we heard that Hardy is the one who hatched the idea of the film and finds it to be an inspirational story to tell. While I can’t imagine both of these projects will go into production, hopefully Warner Bros. pushes one of them forward and as a personal preference, the multi-strand, Traffic-esque approach sounds a bit more interesting.
Which project sounds more appealing? Would you like to see both come to screen?