Michael Mann trusts Will Smith to lead his EMPIRE!
The movie about a media mogul see's Mann and Smith team together for the first time since Ali six years ago.
Empire and it comes from a John Logan (Gladiator, The Last Samurai) script. He's also the guy who Mann commissioned to write the screenplay for The Aviator with the intention of directing it himself, until he left it in the capable hands of Martin Scorsese. Variety are as clueless as we are as to what Empire is about but they can confirm that Smith is expected to play a media mogul. Does that hint that this movie might be a more dramatic affair, than the action stuff he has given us over the last few years? The Columbia Pictures movie which Mann and Smith are both producing with their respective shingles, will be the first time the pair have teamed together since Ali six years ago, probably the worst received biopic of a legendary figure in recent times. Mann has to decide whether to go for this movie, the DiCaprio Hollywood noir movie, a movie on the events that led to the death of Alexando Litvinenko or a movie about American World War II pilot Billy Fiske as his next picture, though it's my understanding that he is not working pre-strike (if he is, it will be the Billy Fiske movie he works on).