We caught about twenty minutes of Cameron Crowe’s “Elizabethtown” on TV recently, for the first time since its release, and were reminded why we’re glad that the writer/director has taken half a decade off to recover from that train wreck. Reports came in earlier in the year that Crowe had signed on to a new project, “We Bought A Zoo,” based on Benjamin Mee’s memoir of how he, along with his young family, purchased a zoo in Britain (as the title might suggest), while his wife was succumbing to a terminal illness.
Ben Stiller was initially linked to the lead role but various sites are now reporting that Matt Damon is in early talks to take that part (as far as we can tell, Variety were first up, but Deadline and The Hollywood Reporter all had the story within minutes of each other). But what’s that? Production Weekly reported over a month ago that Damon was circling the project? Why, so they did.
Fox have set the release date for December 23rd next year, in the same slot that proved so lucrative for the studio with “Marley & Me,” and to be honest we’re expecting something not unlike that. At the same time, however, Damon has a pretty solid taste in projects, and we’re sure that Crowe won’t produce something as anonymously saccharine as the Owen Wilson/Jennifer Aniston movie, but even so, we wish that he was moving ahead with his Marvin Gaye biopic before this one.