The increasingly high on its own supply Universal has once more delved into its library and come up with Scarface, because in Hollywood it is perpetually 1 a.m., everyone’s a little wasted, and it’s loud as shit in here, so we may as well watch something we’ve already seen a million times. Deadline reports that the studio is currently working with Martin Bregman, producer of the Al Pacino version, to develop a new take on Scarface that—like Brian De Palma’s 1983 update of Howard Hawks’ 1932 original—will be neither remake nor sequel, but rather another play on the “common elements” of the archetypal gangster story. It will, however, still bear the name Scarface, as a lot of guys already have that on their T-shirts. (Some of them have even named their dog that, which is a sign that you should think up an excuse to leave their house soon.)
Anyway, this new Scarface will once more concern some sort of outsider and/or immigrant violently climbing the ranks of a criminal enterprise “in pursuit of a twisted version of the American dream,” though today’s exact type of immigrant, racket, and twisted American dream are still yet to be determined, essentially through a game of sociological Mad Libs. A ruthless Armenian who blasts his way to the top of the prepaid phone card scam, only to lose it all in a decadent haze of long-distance calls? A short-tempered Nova Scotian who smuggles cheap prescriptions across the Canadian border, then flames out with his face buried in a mountain of Lipitor? Whatever the specifics, expect the hip-hop industry to launch its own internal turf war over who gets to do its soundtrack—which, come to think of it, may as well be the plot of the new Scarface movie.