It has been over 20 years since Free Willy convinced the movie-watching public that keeping a wild animal in captivity is wrong, and only one year since Blackfish—the gritty, modern reboot of Free Willy—reminded the movie-watching public that it’s still wrong and that, hey, maybe we should all do something about it one of these days. Now Hollywood is back with another tearjerking story about a killer whale being abused and the quest to set him free, but there’s a twist this time: The animal is an elephant, not a killer whale.
This comes from Deadline, which reports that producer Larry Brezner has just picked up the rights to the story of Raju, the elephant who—after 50 years of being chained up and abused by his owners—reportedly cried tears of joy when a crack team of operatives from the Wildlife SOS Conservation and Care Center in India rescued him. The movie will be about Kartrick Satyanarayan and Nikki Sharp—two members of the Wildlife SOS Foundation—as they come up with the plan to save Raju, so we’re assuming it’ll combine all of the Free Willy stuff with a little Zero Dark Thirty for good measure.