After navigating through Los Angeles’s gang underworld in 2001’s Training Day, it looks like Ethan Hawke and Denzel Washington will team up on the silver screen again, but this time they’ll be trading in their LAPD badges for spurs. Variety reports that the Boyhood Academy Award nominee is in “final negotiations” to join Washington, as well as Training Day‘s director Antoine Fuqua, in the remake of 1960’s The Magnificent Seven.
Moviegoers might be wary of a shiny and new version of the classic western, but they must remember that the highly praised film—which starred Steve McQueen, Charles Bronson, James Coburn, and Yul Brynner among others—wasn’t exactly an original piece of art itself. (The Magnificent Seven was, in fact, a remake of Akira Kurosawa’s 1954 masterpiece Seven Samurai.) While remakes come and go (albeit they seem to be coming too often, nowadays), what should potentially be worrying for audiences is how many changes this particular film has already undergone including script rewrites and major cast changes.
Beyond the one-two punch of Washington and Hawke, at this moment Magnificent Seven will also star Chris Pratt and Haley Bennett. Looks like they need to cast at least three more “magnificent” people to complete the set.
