Acting in the firm knowledge that the movie market of today (or a couple of years from now, or whenever, really) is still slavering at the thought of a new Dick Tracy movie, Warren Beatty has assured fans that he’s still definitely thinking about starting work some time soon on a sequel to his 1990 primary-color crime caper. Beatty—who spent the last few years waging a series of court battles to retain the film rights to the Chester Gould-created gumshoe, which he’s definitely going to start putting to use any day now, for real—made the statements during an award ceremony today at CinemaCon, where he also talked about that other movie he plans to make, before he gets around to making the one he just spent the last decade ensuring he’ll be able to get started on some day, whenever that happens to be.
That new film: a Howard Hughes biopic, which Beatty has also been struggling to get made for years, because late-era Warren Beatty is the smart-but-lazy, procrastination-prone high school student of modern filmmakers. Apparently New Regency Productions has found the right mix of incentives, lures, and threats to take his XBox away, though, to get him moving, because the Howard Hughes film—which will see Beatty returning to the screen for the first time in 15 years to play the aging billionaire—is expected to hit theaters later this year.
Once that’s over, Beatty will be able to turn his attention back to his beloved, long-obsessed over Dick Tracy—at least until he sees another biopic he just desperately needs to make, or, like, an interesting bird goes flying past his window or something, fatally distracting him yet again.