Last summer, it was announced that Jamie Foxx would portray Mike Tyson in an forthcoming biopic penned by “The Wolf of Wall Street” screenwriter/”Boardwalk Empire” showrunner and lead writer Terence Winter. Around the same time, Tyson himself was claiming to IGN that performance capture technology would allow Foxx to play the pugilist in his younger days, adding “I think that Martin Scorsese is going to be involved in it as well.” It seems that chatter has gained a bit more steam.
Stopping by Power 105’s “The Breakfast Club,” Foxx said that Scorsese will direct the Tyson flick. “I just went in with Paramount with Mike Tyson. So I’m going to do the Mike Tyson story. Listen, to be in the same room pitching Mike Tyson to Paramount, Mike Tyson is on one side, I’m on the other side doing Mike Tyson at the same time. And Martin Scorsese at the helm. This will be the first boxing movie that Martin Scorsese has done since ‘Raging Bull.’”
Nothing is officially confirmed, and at the moment Scorsese is shooting “Silence” for release next year and has a backlog of features and documentaries cooking as well. So we’ll see where this Tyson pick lands. But it’s an interesting one to consider, and perhaps the filmmaker will need to swing back to a more commercial venture after the aforesaid drama about seventeenth century Jesuit priests. [via The Smoking Section]