Tradecraft: Guy Ritchie Ponders U.N.C.L.E.

The Man From U.N.C.L.E. movie at Warner Bros. might not be dead yet, despite Steven Soderbergh recently exiting the project. Deadline reports that the studio is in talks with their Sherlock Holmes director/producer team of Guy Ritchie and Lonel Wigram to come aboard the feature adaptation of the classic Sixties spy series. The trade blog seems to indicate that Scott Z. Burns' script (developed with Soderbergh) is still in play, so it's just possible that we might yet see a Sixties-set U.N.C.L.E. movie. (I'd expected the period element to go out the window with Soderbergh.) I could see Ritchie applying the same sort of period makeover on the Cold War that he did to Victorian times with Sherlock Holmes. In fact, I suspect the result might resemble the Sixties as Steranko portrayed it at the time in the pages of his Nick Fury comic... and that would not be a bad thing at all. It definitely won't be the same as Soderbergh would have done it, but I believe Ritchie capable of delivering a cool Man From U.N.C.L.E. movie. Here's hoping! Of course, the big question goes back to casting, the issue that ultimately stalled Soderbergh's take. With Ritchie and Wigram involved, the obvious frontrunner would seem to be Robert Downey Jr. He's definitely overexposed these days, but he's actually a much better choice for Napoleon Solo than some of the other names we heard bandied about recently...