Pirates writer Terry Rossio might turn Steve McQueen’s old junk into a Robert Downey Jr. movie

We’re going to take this slow, because this news—which comes from Deadline—is weird and a little confusing. Back in the ‘60s, Steve McQueen—the guy from Bullitt, not the director—came up with an idea for a movie called Yucatan. It was about a “renegade salvage expert” searching for some lost Mayan treasure in the Yucatan Peninsula, and McQueen himself would’ve starred in it. He didn’t just have this idea, though, he wrote it down in a 1,700-page treatment, stuffed those pages into some trunks, and then, presumably, forgot about it for 20 years. After he died in 1980, some renegade salvage experts—or his family or whatever—discovered the trunks and realized they could still make Yucatan if the right famous Hollywood actor came along. The kind of famous Hollywood actor who is cool like McQueen, but, you know, still alive.

Suddenly, an alarm bell rang at the mansion of famous Hollywood actor Robert Downey Jr., prompting him to leap into action. “What’s that noise, JARVIS?” Downey asked his virtual butler.

“It appears as though someone is trying to revive an old Steve McQueen movie idea, but they need a cool actor to play the lead.” JARVIS responded, in the voice of famous Hollywood actor Paul Bettany.

“Well, then. This looks like a job for Robert Downey Jr.!” Downey shouted as he strapped on his rocket boots and flew into the air, ready to save the day. Team Downey, the production company he runs with his wife—producer Susan Downey—then picked up the rights to Yucatan and hired Pirates Of The Caribbean writer Terry Rossio to turn McQueen’s 1,700 pages into an actual script for a movie. According to Deadline, Rossio’s script will use McQueen’s idea as a “jumping-off point,” with the rest of the story becoming more of a “mind-bending adventure.”

The plan is for Downey to star in Yucatan, and since his studio is developing it, we think he has a good chance of getting that part. We don’t know how different it’ll end up being from what McQueen came up with, but Downey says he’s hoping to “imbue” it “with a sense of how he might have made it nowadays.” Really, though, we just hope the movie is less complicated than the story behind it.