Cameron Crowe has finished licking his Elizabethtown wounds and will return to writing and directing heartfelt films beginning with We Bought A Zoo, an adaptation of a memoir by Benjamin Mee chronicling his family’s decision to purchase a dilapidated zoo in the English countryside. According to The Hollywood Reporter, Crowe is rewriting Aline Brosh McKenna’s script, presumably to inject it with his own Gen-X resonance. The film will tell Mee’s story of readying the zoo for a reopening while caring for both his children and its endangered animals, all while his wife was dying from brain cancer. The Playlist cites rumors via the latest issue of Production Weekly that Matt Damon and Ben Stiller have both been offered roles. Fox has already set a release date for December 23, 2011.
This news comes right after Deadline announced that Terrence Howard is ultra-unofficially on board Crowe’s long-simmering Marvin Gaye biopic, with Howard cautioning, “Nothing’s been signed on paper yet.” It now sounds like Crowe and Howard will have to save the sexual healing until at least next year.