Martin Scorsese is likely cooling his heels as he (and the rest of us) awaits the release of Shutter Island. If he has another Departed-size financial hit on his hands, the sky is probably the limit as to what he and favorite boy Leonardo DiCaprio can do next. But would Scorsese really pass over his Sinatra biopic and a half dozen other projects to go film a children's book adaptation in Europe?

The European media seems to think so. Via The Playlist, apparently a French film site and major German newspaper believe that Scorsese is heading to Paris this May to film The Invention of Hugo Cabret, an adaptation of a 2007 children's book about an orphan who lives hidden in the walls of a Paris train station (you can learn all about it here). I challenge you to come up with a single way in which this would be related to what Scorsese has express interest in lately, because I can't think of anything.

The project was initially announced in May 2008 as a project for Ice Age director Chris Wedge, who has since signed on to make a Spore movie and another animated project for Fox. The one connecting thread to Scorsese is Graham King, who produced The Departed and is also signed on to this one.

Still... this seems even odder than that Cleopatra musical that Soderbergh is working on, though I guess since that one is real, this could be too. It would be strange for two different news sources in two separate countries to make up the same story, but then again, bad information travels fast these days. Hopefully someone with the actual story can speak up on this soon.