According to The Hollywood Reporter, Universal has landed The Real McCoy, a pitch written by Bill Dubuque that was recently making the rounds. Universal and Warner Bros. ultimately duked it out for the action-adventure movie about real-life Prohibition-era bootlegger Bill McCoy. Tom McNulty will produce alongside Michael De Luca, with Mark Williams from Zero Gravity set to executive produce.
Pearce Bunting plays an onscreen version of the historical figure on Boardwalk Empire, but the rising king of action movies himself Chris Pratt is set to play McCoy—the namesake for the idiom “the real McCoy”—in the feature film. When McNulty and Dubuque took the idea to Pratt, he was immediately on board. So Pratt will soon be able to add roguish bootlegger to his growing list of roguish leading men that only seem to vary in their occupations.