David Ayer (Training Day, The Fast and the Furious) has been hired to adapt the Sam Peckinpah classic Western The Wild Bunch for Warner Bros. Pictures.
According to Variety the film is the latest to join "other high-profile oaters stampeding back to Hollywood."

Thing is, it should come as no great surprise that since Hollywood seems hell-bent-for-leather on 'reinventing' the Western with remakes-remakes-remakes this year, this new "Bunch" is, of course, delightfully updated to meet today's fine standards of cinematic quality in essence, this story will deal with "a robbery amid the corruption and payoffs of the drug business and is set in contemporary Mexico," instead of the pre-World War 1 era of Peckinpah's 1969 sacred classic.

ReadTheWest.com's Pre-production Prediction:
Oh, joy. There's nothing like a heaping in-your-face overdose of modern-day realism to destroy the beloved escapism factor that comes in watching a classic western film. So if filmmakers want to take the 'Old' out of Old West, you gotta wonder what they'll take away next?  No hoofbeats, no Winchesters, no Tommy guns?  (...No classic?)

C'monTHE WILD BUNCH is a Peckinpah, not an Ayer's.

If there's any kind of stampeding to occur, it will likely come in the form of hordes of movie-goers who skip the box office and instead descend upon video stores in search of something anything original to pop into the VCR. And in the aftermath watch those 'they' people in Hollywood blame us Us's again, as they whine on and on about how those durn Westerns just ain't much of a profitable proposition for the box office these days.

Still, to be fair, it remains to be seen at this early stage whether or not Ayer's adaptation will allow for the kind of gripping drama and relaxing scenery most of us Western enthusiasts respond to and willingly pony up the big bucks to watch such big-screen pleasures.

But then, the violence alone would probably erase the story and the Mexican scenery from memory anyhow. Guess we'll just have to wait and see what the scribe comes up with.

More to be posted as details develop.
STATUS:
In development

Who's in it:

Filming Location:

Director:

Screenwriter:  David Ayer

Story Source:
Sam Peckinpah's THE WILD BUNCH (1969)