Things aren’t so quiet on the Western front this morning—following the news of some forward movement on that Dark Tower adaptation, The Hollywood Reporter has just learned that Christian Bale will team up with his Out Of The Furnace director Scott Cooper for the Western drama Hostiles. Cooper, who helped bring Black Mass to the masses last year, rewrote the script from the late Don Stewart (1982’s Missing), and filming is scheduled to begin this summer.
Bale, who portrayed a reluctant gunslinger in 2007’s 3:10 To Yuma, will play a “Native American-hating soldier, nearing retirement, who is given one last assignment: to escort an Indian chief back to his Montana reservation.” But this hateful, as-yet-unnamed soldier will somehow learn to “respect the race he hates,” while also fending off attacks from the Comanche and presumably wooing a young widow he meets along the way. The role doesn’t currently appear to require as extreme a physical transformation as Bale is used to—though even he seems to have grown weary of that—but if Hostiles ends up borrowing a page from The Revenant, Bale could at least find himself at the mercy of some ferocious animal while on an arduous trek through the wilderness.