British actor Benedict Cumberbatch is busy at the moment filming two big Marvel blockbusters with “Doctor Strange In The Multiverse of Madness” and “Spider-Man: No Way Home,” but has reportedly secured his next project and will be returning to the war genre in “War Magician.” He previously tackled it with “1917,” “War Horse,” and earning an Oscar nomination for the WWII drama “The Imitation Game.”
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Deadline has revealed that Benedict will star in a StudioCanal film, titled “War Magician,” that will be directed by “Jurassic World”s Colin Trevorrow with a script from screenwriter E. Nicholas Mariani. The war movie is an adaption of the book written by David Fisher and is based on the true story of Jasper Maskelyne, a British illusionist that was part of a “magic gang” that used magic to defeat Erwin Rommel aka The Desert Fox and The Nazis on multiple fronts during World War II. The locations mentioned for the film include Africa, Europe, and the Middle-East which should give the project a globetrotting element that we don’t often see with films exploring the events of WWII.
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The project sounds like the British desert campaign counterpart to Ben Affleck’s WWII film “Ghost Army,” where the U.S. military had a division that created fake troops and military equipment to fool the Germans on the battlefield.
Colin Trevorrow is coming-off an extended pandemic shoot on Universal Pictures‘ “Jurassic World: Dominion” and had been developing “Star Wars: Episode IX” when it was still under the working title “Duel of The Fates” before J.J. Abrams was tasked to finish the sequel trilogy after Colin exited.
It’s unclear when they plan on getting cameras rolling on “War Magician.”