A mild disturbance shook the Chris Force—a.k.a., Hollywood’s loose collective of photogenic white men named Chris, often seen standing next to some very expensive CGI or a person in a cape—today, as THR reports that Chris Pine has signed on to play news legend Walter Cronkite in Ben Jacoby’s Newsflash. Seth Rogen was originally signed up to play the part, back when David Gordon Green was still attached to direct; there’s no word yet on whether Rogen’s critical Chris deficiency may have contributed to the shift.
Written by Jacoby—and with no director currently attached—Newsflash reportedly centers on the day that helped elevate Cronkite to the level of a minor American household god: The assassination of John F. Kennedy, which saw Cronkite’s steady manning of the CBS News desk provide a guiding hand of stability on a day of national chaos. The film will focus on the efforts to provide accurate news coverage on a very tumultuous day, centered on Cronkite, plus producer Don Hewitt, CBS News boss Jim Aubrey, and a young upstart by the name of Dan Rather.
At 38, Pine—who recently played a fictitious journalist of far less prestigious reputation in Patty Jenkins’ I Am The Night—is nearly a decade younger than Cronkite was on that fateful day; still, it’s impossible to deny that he and the news institution (who died in 2009) share a certain smoldering, unrelenting, undeniable sexual charisma that practically burns its way through the screen.