We’ve been called plenty of names in the past, but now you can add visionary. Six years ago after we suggested Jamie Foxx for a MLK biopic, word came down this afternoon that both he and Oliver Stone are circling that very project.
DreamWorks, which scored with another historical icon, Lincoln, last year is interested in diving in the biopic business again. The company is in early talks with Stone to direct Foxx to star as Martin Luther King Jr. in an untitled biopic.
They have been trying to get the picture into production for the past three years when they were partnering with Warner Bros. for a co-production. While the film has yet to be greenlit, securing Stone and Foxx surely puts the film on the path for success.
Written by Kario Salem wrote the original script with Suzanne De Passe, the film would follow the famous civil rights activist from his rise all the way to assassination in 1968.
Both Foxx and Stone are no strangers to tackling projects dealing with historical events and iconic individuals. Stone has made himself with films like JFK, World Trade Center and W. while Foxx won an Oscar for his role as Ray Charles in Ray.
There are a multitude of projects revolving around Dr. King. Writer-director Ava DuVernay will helm Selma, a feature drama about King‘s 1965 landmark voting rights campaign regarded as the peak of the civil rights movement.
Also, Paul Greengrass and Scott Rudin’s are circling Memphis, about King’s final days. The Memphis script depicts King’s struggle to organize a protest march on behalf of striking black municipal sanitation workers in Memphis, TN, where he was slain. The storyline is juxtaposed with an intense manhunt for King’s assassin James Earl Ray, involving some of the federal authorities who, at Hoover’s direction, had dogged King’s every step with wiretaps and whispering campaigns before the civil rights leader’s death.
Then there’s the HBO miniseries America: In the King Years, from Harpo Films’ Oprah Winfrey and Kate Forte and based on Taylor Branch’s book trilogy.