Now that he is nearing completion on the Labours of Ratner—to cut off the head of the Hydra of bad publicity, to kill the lion of LGBT intolerance, etc.—Brett Ratner will soon be unbound and free to pursue his long-in-the-making film about Hercules. And so the muses of Variety sing a song of strength and fortitude and typecasting by confirming that Hercules will be played by Dwayne Johnson, whose own Sisyphean struggle to roll away “The Rock” has made him uniquely attuned to such mythological quests, plus he has muscles and stuff. Johnson—who also just signed on to star in the Russo Brothers’ Ciudad, playing a mercenary who rescues a Brazilian drug lord’s kidnapped daughter—is expected to begin shooting Hercules this October, with Ratner directing from screenwriter Ryan Condal’s adaptation of the graphic novel Hercules: The Thracian War. The story similarly finds Hercules working as a mercenary while training the King of Thrace’s bloodthirsty army—albeit filtered through Brett Ratner’s eye for epic proportions, wink wink—which hopefully means Johnson won't need to rehearse.
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