After years of stops and starts, the long-awaited attempt to bring the popular 80s crime show, The Equalizer to the big screen appears to be a go. The Training Day reunion will reunite Denzel Washington with director Antoine Fuqua.
The highly-rated show which starred the Edward Woodward centered on a middle aged retired intelligence officer with a mysterious past who helps people in trouble. The show mixes ingredients from popular spy films and private investigator shows with violent realism. Washington will play the title character.
Cast in the lead opposite Washington is Kick-Ass 2 and Carrie star Chloë Moretz. She will play a young prostitute named Teri, a role written for a slightly older actress. Comparisons are already being made of the relationship between Washington’s Robert McCall and Moretz’s character to that of Robert De Niro and Jodie Foster in Taxi Driver. Moretz had a “chemistry read” with Washington that impressed the Oscar-winning actor.
Washington and Fuqua caught lightning in a bottle with their first film, Training Day. After telling us that he was going to get Washington an Oscar, Fuqua’s direction delivered on that promise as he walked away with his second Academy Award. Fuqua recently helmed the successful action film, Olympus Has Fallen and his star will next be seen opposite Mark Wahlberg in the action thriller, 2 Guns.
The show’s creator Michael Sloan, has signed a deal to write a new Robert McCall novel to be published sometime in early 2014.
The Equalizer opens in theaters on April 11, 2014.