Right as his 156th birthday passes by, we have some Nikola Tesla-related news that’s bound to raise several eyebrows; my own are standing upright at the mere notion, as a matter of fact. Take the following story with a couple of salt grains, but Wild-Rooster (via BleedingCool) allege that Christian Bale and Nicolas Cage are lining up Universal’s Tesla, Ruler of the World, in which the former will play Tesla and the latter would be seen as Thomas Edison. And, on the directing side of things, it’s believed (though not confirmed) that Mike Newell will make it his Great Expectations follow-up.

The film’s genre has yet to be truly stipulated, but I’m almost getting something of a sci-fi vibe here. Not just because Nikola Tesla conducted some crazy experiments with electrical currents and whatnot, but also thanks to a note that Vladimir Rajcic‘s screenplay “will link events from Tesla’s life to a modern day story of technological crisis.”

(Funny that, in this case, I’m making associations and assumptions based on the Bale‘s own The Prestige — in that film, he was brilliantly portrayed by David Bowie. I, needless to say, am expecting a different kind of performance and, possibly, a less ethereal depiction in Tesla.)

Now, is anyone else sort of blown back by the potential that lies in a pairing of Bale and Cage? Along with the fact that I simply never considered it a possibility — which is enough to make it interesting for yours truly — you have to remember that both display a clear capacity to really get crazy when the material does (or doesn’t) call for such behavior.

One can’t reasonably imagine the film’s only a screaming match between the two — however accurate to their real-life rivalry that may prove to be — but, hey, one can also dream. Even if it’s a more subdued sort of onscreen relationship, I am absolutely dying to see how these two bounce off one another; while it, alone, makes Tesla a project worthy of consideration, the subject matter does a little bit of the heavy-lifting, too.

Rade Šerbedžija (Taken 2) and Lolita Davidovich (Gods and Monsters) will be co-starring, with “major roles” for their taking.

What do you think of Bale and Cage going head-to-head in a Tesla-Edison film?