As the world holds its breath waiting to see what rising star Arnold Schwarzenegger will do next—besides turn vanity into viable children’s entertainment, of course—Vulture had moved yet another contender to an increasingly clotted pile. Cry Macho, based on the 1975 novel by the late N. Richard Nash (The Rainmaker), would find Schwarzenegger playing a broken-down horse trainer who agrees to kidnap his former boss’s son from his rich ex-wife, only to discover that the ex-wife doesn’t really want her son back.
The project has been kicked around for a while by The Godfather and Million Dollar Baby producer Al Ruddy, who at one point had Clint Eastwood attached to star—and with Schwarzenegger’s recently professed plans to take a quieter, latter-day Eastwood approach to getting back into acting, it seems like Cry Macho may be the sort of project he had in mind. (And in fact, Schwarzenegger specifically mentioned the film as a possibility when he first announced his return.) Vulture says it’s now moving toward a summer start date under The Lincoln Lawyer director Brad Furman, although as with all of these “Schwarzenegger’s next film” announcements—like that “sheriff vs. supercar” movie, and the Terminator revival supposedly reuniting the original cast—we’ll kind of only believe it when we see it.