In an announcement that eliminates any lingering doubts as to whether a member of the Affleck family might get involved with a movie set in Boston, Variety reports that Casey Affleck will star in and produce an upcoming film about the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing. The movie will be based on Boston Strong, a book by journalists Casey Sherman and Dave Wedge that still hasn’t been published. Eric Johnson and Paul Tamasy, who wrote The Fighter, optioned the feature rights to the book before a word had even been written, probably figuring that an Affleck was bound to jump on board eventually.
Johnson and Tamasy were initially in talks to turn Boston Strong into a television miniseries, but the deal fell through this past summer. With Affleck on hand to lend the project Bostonian verisimilitude, they plan to pitch it to studios next week. The movie will focus on the manhunt for the two men behind the bombing and the city’s reaction to it. At this point, it’s not clear what role Affleck will play, but the smart money has him cast as some kind of law enforcement officer—perhaps as a Boston-based detective similar to the one he may play in an upcoming movie about the Boston Strangler. Or maybe he’ll play a Boston-based private detective, like his role in Gone Baby Gone. The possibilities are pretty wide open, albeit specifically located in Boston.