This summer we reported on Robert and Susan Downey‘s Team Downey production start-up and their first film they’ve been developing, Yucatan. The project is a heist film that is the brainchild of legendary late actor, Steve McQueen.
Deadline reports that Sherlock Holmes and Invictus writer Anthony Peckham has been hired to work on the script as “a star vehicle for Downey.” Peckham was recently hired to pen the new Jack Ryan film, Moscow, starring Chris Pine. In this film, Downey will play “an archaeologist from the Museum of London who enlists a renegade Navy diver, who works for the oil companies and races motorcycles on the shores of the Mojave, in a plan to explore the cenotes, caves in the Yucatan jungle that reveal underground lakes. Here, a millennium before, Mayan priests sacrificed virgins covered in gold and precious jewels, a fortune rumored to still adorn their skeletons at the bottom of these sacred wells.”
When McQueen died over 25 years ago he “left behind two custom-made trunks containing 16 leather-bound notebooks full of drawings, period photographs, a detailed script continuity containing over 1,700 pages of hand-typed/written material by McQueen. This was the remains of his lost vanity project titled Yucatan, a blueprint for a movie written entirely without dialogue, in a hyper-stylized poetry.” [/Film]
This long in-development project seems like a good fit for Downey Jr. and it will be great to see how his first production venture works out. RDJ can next be seen in Todd Phillips’ Due Date which hits theaters November 5th.
What do you think about RDJ’s first Team Downey project?