Sometimes when studios start setting up rival identical projects there's an identifiable trend behind it, like the competing "found footage" films in production following the success of Paranormal Activity, or all the outer space epics post-Avatar. But I haven't got a clue why not one but two major studios want to make big-budget films about Moses, especially since The Ten Commandments doesn't seem to have disappeared from the earth recently or anything.

According to Vulture, both Fox and Warner Bros. have Moses-centric projects in development, and though only one seems to be specifically focused on the exodus from Egypt, I can't imagine the other is all about the baby found in the reeds. Both films are only in the script stage, and they come from widely different sources; the Warner Bros. project is written by Stuart Hazeldine, who also worked on a Paradise Lost adaptation for Warner Bros., along with Kings creator Michael Green, while the Fox project is from screenwriting team Bill Collage and Adam Cooper, who last worked on the Justin Long vehicle Accepted. I'd peg the former team to be the most Biblically well-versed-- Kings was a loose adaptation of the Book of David-- but screenwriters always have a way of surprising, so who knows.

There's no telling which project will get going sooner, but I guarantee it's a race to the finish line, since not both of them can go in development. There's only room for one movie to replace Charlton Heston up on the mountain with the tablets.

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