Vincent D'Onofrio will soon be seen portraying one of the most terrifying villains of the Marvel universe, as his performance as The Kingpin will be unleashed upon the world when Daredevil hits Netflix on April 10th, but he's now evidently wrangled an antagonist role in a much different kind of setting. New reports are coming in saying that the actor has signed on to play play the main baddie of the upcoming The Magnificent Seven remake.
This news comes to us from Variety, which says that D'Onofrio is currently in talks, but doesn't really provide any details about his character. His joining an impressive ensemble that already includes Denzel Washington, Chris Pratt, Ethan Hawke and Haley Bennett, all playing various hero roles. The project is being directed by Antoine Fuqua, who famously directed both Washington and Hawke in the Oscar-winning Training Day, and just recently worked with Washington on the action thriller hit The Equalizer.
While this new Magnificent Seven is an interpretation of the John Sturges film from 1960 - which in turn was an interpretation of Akira Kurosawa's Seven Samurai - there has been some twisting done to the plot. While the original movie featured a group of seven gunslingers protecting a Mexican village from a gang of outlaws, this new movie will be about a small town being threatened by a gold mining baron. A woman (Bennett) hires a bounty hunter (Washington) for help, and in turn he rounds up a posse of six other gunmen. Nic Pizzolatto, who has earned incredible acclaim as the creator of the hit HBO series True Detective, wrote the first drafts of the script, though John Lee Hancock (Saving Mr. Banks, The Blind Side) has been the writer working on the screenplay most recently.
Vincent D'Onofrio has never really been a stranger to the villain role - with titles like The Salton Sea and The Cell coming to mind -and Daredevil won't even be his only time playing an antagonist this year. Soon he will also been seen on the big screen as the central bad guy of Jurassic World - which, funnily enough, will also have him squaring off against Chris Pratt. Also scheduled to come out this year for the actor is the crime drama Broken Horses, the biopic Pele, and James Franco's In Dubious Battle, which tells the true story of a labor movement for farm workers in 1930s California.
The Magnificent Seven is still in the casting process (you may have noticed that the movie doesn't have seven heroes attached just yet), but we should expect them to all come together in the next few weeks. This is because production is expected to start within the next month. Sony and MGM are making the movie, though they have not yet announced an official release date. Given the production's schedule, one can estimate that the movie will be out some time in 2016.
