It's been about a year since it was first announced that Tangled and Crazy Stupid Love scribe Dan Fogelman would make his directorial debut with Imagine, Warner Bros' John Lennon infused family drama that he penned.
Al Pacino signed on last year to play a Bruce Springsteen-type rocker who discovers a long-unopened letter addressed to him from John Lennon; after reading it, he’s shocked to learn that he actually fathered a son and decides to track him down.
Fogelman was originally looking to reteam with his Crazy Stupid Love star, Steve Carell, who had to drop out of the role of the long lost son. Now Variety reports that Jeremy Renner has replaced him. There's only about a decade age difference between the two actors, so it's nothing that can't be tweaked in the script. Julianne Moore has also taken a lead role in the film.
I'm still not sold on Pacino as an aging rocker. As transformative of an actor as he can be, I feel like I've just been watching Pacino as Pacino for the past decade -- which hasn't always been a bad thing.
I'll gladly welcome any Beatles-inspired films out there, because I think we'll still have to patiently wait for a proper John Lennon post-Beatles biopic. There's no word on how much of Lennon's music will be used in the film, but I imagine (no pun intended) that it will be nicely laced with the musician's timeless tunes -- Yoko Ono seems pretty open, having given permission for Sam Taylor-Wood to use Lennon's track "Mother" in Nowhere Boy, the Lennon bio-pic which chronicled his pre-Beatle days.
Warner Bros aims to begin shooting Imagine in late April or early May.