Ready Player Next
With Ready Player One his biggest hit in a decade, what’s Steven Spielberg cooking next?
INDIANA JONES 5
Spielberg announced at the Empire Awards in March that Indiana Jones 5 will go before the cameras in the UK in April/may 2019 with a release date of 10 July 2020. David Koepp is writing, Harrison Ford will return, anything else you read is what Indy might call folklore.
WEST SIDE STORY
Spielberg’s long-held desire to make a musical seems to be moving ever closer to fruition. Adapted by regular collaborator Tony Kushner (Munich, Lincoln, The Kidnapping Of Edgardo Mortara), his take on the Jets vs Sharks fest is mooted as a more realistic, ethnically sensitive take than Robert Wise’s 1961 Oscar winner. After a casting call went out, actors such as Glee’s Naya Rivera fell over themselves to audition. Yet, it might have a rival.
A SECRET LEONARD BERNSTEIN PROJECT
On March 9, Variety revealed Spielberg had conducted a secret roundtable read of a script detailing the life of West Side Story composer Leonard Bernstein.
The Post screenwriter Josh Singer has a Bernstein project set up at Paramount but Spielberg’s film is believed to be different. The director is known to do read-throughs as part of his process — it doesn’t mean he’s committing to a project, but it just might invade West
Side Story’s turf.
THE KIDNAPPING OF EDGARDO MORTARA
Spielberg had picked Italian locations and cast Oscar Isaac and Mark Rylance for this, but segued to shoot The Post instead when he couldn’t find an actor to play the titular child. Still, this drama about a young Jewish boy forcibly raised as a Christian in the 19th century remains on his radar. “I am absolutely determined to do it,” he reveals exclusively to Empire. “It’s one of the greatest stories I have ever had the opportunity to tell. We are doing a lot of soft casting. The next time Oscar Isaac and Mark Rylance are available and I can find my Edgardo, I am going to tell that story one day.”