Clint Eastwood Eyeing To Direct Final Film at Warner, Rumored To Star Nicholas Hault and Toni Collette
Legendary actor-turned-director Clint Eastwood is looking at retiring, but he wants to do it with one final hurrah.
According to Discussing Film, Eastwood is packaging his final directing feature at Warner Bros. — it would be titled Juror #2. The story of the film would be about a juror on a murder trial who realizes he may have committed the crime, and must decide whether to put someone else in jail for it or to come forward and turn himself in.
As far as the cast goes, Discussing Film could only find out that the studio is looking at a rising Hollywood star that has a major film coming up soon; while the list can be quite long, the site Giant Freakin’ Robot put the names of Nicholas Hoult (Renfield) and Toni Collette (in a different role) out there around the same time as Discussing Film posted the story. The site is known for posting a lot of click-bait stories and unfounded exclusives that have no basis in reality, but Hoult does make sense as the star of the film, and it matches the Discussing Film description. We are giving this one the benefit of the doubt.
Eastwood has become something of a polarizing figure in Hollywood these past few years; his infamous way of shooting only one take per scene has its advantages for studio execs trying to come in under budget, but usually, shorthands the final cuts of the movies and doesn’t give the actors enough time to get into each scene. In 2018’s The 15:17 to Paris, he decided to cast real marines in the movie about the retelling of their own story, raising a lot of eyebrows at the studio and the audience.
As revealed by The Wall Street Journal, his 2021 film Cry Macho was only greenlit by the studio because of their relationship over the decades with the Million Dollar Baby director, and not because it made financial sense to them (the movie made $16M worldwide on a $33M budget, though it was a victim of the day-and-date release strategy on HBO Max that year). New Warner honcho David Zaslav, according to the Journal, said when he found out about it: “We don’t owe anyone any favors.” Warner Bros. has been a studio that has built over the decades relationships with their filmmakers, and they like to keep them around. Scorsese has worked with WB in many of his films, including Mean Streets or Goodfellas, and perhaps the most notable of these cases is Christopher Nolan, who unceremoniously parted ways with them after they sent every 2021 film straight to HBO Max the same day they were to open in theaters.
No timeline has been given for Juror #2 because, in fact, no deal has been finalized yet. But Eastwood likes to act quickly, so we could potentially see the film in theaters within a year.
Miguel Fernández is a Spanish student that has movies as his second passion in life. His favorite movie of all time is The Lord of the Rings, but he is also a huge Star Wars fan. However, fantasy movies are not his only cup of tea, as authors like Scorsese, Fincher, Kubrick or Hitchcock have been an obsession for him since he started to understand the language of filmmaking. He is that guy who will watch a black and white movie, just because it is in black and white.
