Bruce Willis in Talks to Enter Summit’s ‘Tomb’

Director Antoine Fuqua is circling the prison escape drama from writers Miles Chapman and Jason Keller

Bruce Willis is in talks to star in Summit Entertainment’s prison drama "The Tomb," reports Deadline.

Willis’ "Tears of the Sun" director Antoine Fuqua is said to be circling the project, and while there is mutual interest on both sides, he is not yet in negotiations.

When contacted by TheWrap, Summit would not confirm Deadline’s report, as the project is apparently still in the very early stages of coming together and far from official.

Interestingly enough, Fuqua told the BBC in 2004 that Willis was the single biggest pain in the ass that he’d ever worked with, and said he "did not get along" with Willis on the set of "Tears of the Sun." Perhaps there’s been a reconciliation in the years since?

Should the deals close, Willis would play Ray Breslin, the world’s foremost authority on structural security who has analyzed every maximum-security prison and honed his survival skills in order to design escape-proof prisons. His expertise is put to the test when he’s framed and incarcerated in a prison that he designed himself, which he must escape in order to find the person responsible for putting him in the slammer.

You would think that the court would be aware that Breslin designed the very prison that he’s been sentenced to serve time in, and maybe send him to another prison whose structural details he’s not intimately familiar with, but we’ll forget about that little logic loophole for now. I’m just hoping the movie is more "The Escapist" than "Prison Break."

Fuqua’s is still coasting on the good will he earned with 2001’s capital-G Great "Training Day," but he hasn’t really made a good movie since then, including the recently released generic cop drama "Brooklyn’s Finest." It’s not that Fuqua is a bad director necessarily — he just has questionable taste in projects. "King Arthur" and "Shooter" can both be classified as instantly forgettable middle-brow fare, and Fuqua still has to prove himself as a filmmaker with a voice.

Miles Chapman wrote the original script, which Jason Keller ("Machine Gun Preacher") is rewriting. Robbie Brenner and Mark Canton will produce the film, which is being fast tracked in order to begin production as soon as this fall.

Willis next appears in Sylvester Stallone’s action epic "The Expendables," and will follow that film with another action movie, the comic adaptation "Red." He’ll play the older version of Joseph Gordon-Levitt in Rian Johnson’s "Looper," and he’s also attached to star opposite Jamie Foxx in the big-screen adaptation of the popular videogame "Kane and Lynch."

Willis had better hope that "The Tomb" or one of these other projects redeems him for the disappointing trio of "Cop Out," "Surrogates" and "What Just Happened." I’m in the "Pulp Fiction" star’s corner, but he could sure use a hit, and "Die Hard 5" is probably not the answer, unless screenwriter Skip Woods ("Wolverine") finds a way to resurrect brothers Hans and Simon Gruber.

Comments