It seems Hollywood is full of bad ideas this week, with Orson Welles being ripped from the grave to voice a shitty Christmas movie, and now this.
The Independent (via AV Club) is reporting that a sequel to the gun-slinging classic “Butch Cassidy & The Sundance Kid” is in the works with Sam Shepard set to fill the saddle left vacant by Paul Newman. Entitled “Blackthorn,” the film “will pick up several years after its predecessor left off, following an ageing Cassidy’s attempts to pull off one last robbery that will allow him to return home from Bolivia to the United States. This film has the Wild West outlaw somehow managing to survive the frenzied shootout at the end of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, and now living incognito with a native Bolivian woman, breeding horses and hiding his real identity, for roughly 15 years. He’s persuaded to return to crime by a young engineer….who has robbed a local mine and is also on the run from the forces of law and order.” And no, you didn’t miss something, The Sundance Kid is nowhere to be found in the sequel.
Production on the film is apparently quite far along. Spanish actor Eduardo Noriega (“Open Your Eyes,” “Che”) has been cast to play the young engineer and the film is set to start shooting in Bolivia next month. Mateo Gil, who wrote “The Sea Inside” and “Open Your Eyes,” will be directing from his own script. He doesn’t explain just how Cassidy manages to survive the shootout at the end of the film but we guess that doesn’t really matter at this point.