According to Variety, Steven Spielberg is ready to get to work on his biopic of Abraham Lincoln and is in discussions with Liam Neeson to play the president as he steers the North to victory in the Civil War with plans to start production next January.
A spokesman for Spielberg would not confirm his involvement in the pic but the Variety article goes on to say that Spielberg has wanted to make a movie about Lincoln since 2001, when DreamWorks bought rights to a bio being written by Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Doris Kearns Goodwin.
The book in discussion will be published next fall under the title “The Uniter: The Genius of Abraham Lincoln.”
The only thing that puts this story into speculation is that after War of the Worlds, Spielberg was expected to be moving into his film about the aftermath of the 1972 Munich Olympics, where members of the Israeli team were held hostage and slain by Palestinian terrorists.
Spielberg has moved his sked around more than the Miramax/Dimension release schedule as of late and anything is possible, so stay tuned.
