Update: Deadline reports production will begin this May with Fox aiming for a late 2017 release.
Adding yet another title to his packed slate, Steven Spielberg‘s is partnering his Amblin Entertainment with Fox for The Post, which Tom Hanks and Meryl Streep will lead and which has a Liz Hannah-penned screenplay concerning one of the most horrifying pieces of information ever uncovered by American journalists. The stars will, respectively, play Washington Post editor Ben Bradlee and publisher Kay Graham, whose discovery of documents known as the Pentagon Papers revealed the extent to which the then-recent Johnson administration had lied about the Vietnam war — the extent of various campaigns, the outright existence of others, and how effectively the battle was being waged. [Deadline]
The New York Times first published information that was then carried on by the Washington Post following Nixon and co’s attempts to squelch the leaks, thus linking the story, in some sense, to All the President’s Men, in which Bradlee was portrayed by Jason Robards. Word has it The Post will be fit “into Spielberg’s busy schedule soonest” — presumably, then, ahead of The Kidnapping of Edgardo Mortara, which has already set Mark Rylance and Oscar Isaac, and Indiana Jones V, which is expected to arrive in the summer of 2019. (Before those, Ready Player One arrives in about a year’s time.) That’s, what, four Spielberg films within the next two-and-a-half years? No complaints.