Tom Hardy, Leonardo DiCaprio & Tobey Maguire Are Actually Developing Two Anti-Poaching Movies

Hollywood studios have a history of mounting competing projects that cover similar terrain — think “Deep Impact” and “Armageddon,” or the biopics “Capote” and “Infamous” — but it’s rare that a studio would be developing two similar projects in-house, and that’s exactly what Warner Bros. is doing. A couple of months ago we heard word that Tom Hardy, Tobey Maguire and Leonardo DiCaprio would be collaborating on a “‘Traffic’-like take on poaching and illegal animal smuggling” based on an idea Hardy came up with, but now the trio is also collaborating on a second animal smuggling and poaching film.

It seems that it was always going to be two separate projects but that the initial reports conflated the two. Either way, here’s how it shakes out now. The first project, written by Sheldon Turner (“Up In The Air”) and produced by Maguire and DiCaprio, will be the film that was partially “inspired by [Hardy’s] friends who are former Special Forces operatives and went on to become anti-poacher fighters in South Africa and other nations” in which the ”Lawless” star plays “a former Special Forces soldier who signs on with a friend to work in the bush, training rangers to fight off the poachers decimating the rhino and elephant populations in Zimbabwe.” This film sounds as though it will be fairly contained and localized.

The second project is the one that will be “Traffic”-esque and will detail “the trafficking industry that exploits the global market for illicit parts from slain animals that are used as aphrodisiacs and other ridiculous purposes.” It will be a globe-trotting story that may have appearances by all three leading men. There is currently no writer on board, but with these names attached, we’d imagine there are a few scribes taking meetings now. [Deadline]