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Saving Mr. Banks director John Lee Hancock, pictured right, has come on to rewrite MGM’s remake of The Magnificent Seven, which Tom Cruise is no longer involved with, according to TheWrap.
True Detective scribe Nic Pizzolatto wrote the initial draft of the script. John Sturges directed the original 1960 Western, which itself was based on Akira Kurosawa’s 1954 classic Seven Samurai.
Magnificent Seven starred Yul Brynner, Steve McQueen, Charles Bronson, James Coburn, Robert Vaughn, Brad Dexter and Horst Buchholz as a group of American gunmen hired to protect a small Mexican village from a group of savage bandits led by Calvera (Eli Wallach). The film was followed by three sequels and remade as a CBS series in 1998-2000.
Cruise first became interested in Magnificent Seven back in May 2012, when MGM began developing a remake of its library title, though with his busy schedule, the project was never in his immediate plans. Pizzolatto was hired in August 2012 thanks to heat generated by HBO’s upcoming miniseries True Detective, which stars Matthew McConaughey and Woody Harrelson.
MGM remains focused on mining its library titles to generate new profits. In addition to upcoming reboots of the RoboCop and Poltergeist franchises, the studio is also developing remakes of Death Wish and WarGames.
