James Mangold didn’t get quite as much attention as the Coen brothers when he retooled the black-and-white Western 3:10 to Yuma. But his ambitious picture, which starred Christian Bale and Russell Crowe, is high on many lists as one of the better Westerns of the last few decades.
Mangold has just announced that he intends to make a contemporary Western called The Gunslinger, based on a script by John Hlavin about a Texas Ranger on the trail of the man who killed his brother.
The movie, which hasn’t been cast yet, is meant to open sometime later this year, but 2012 seems a little more likely. Hlavin wrote a number of episodes of the very fine cable cop drama The Shield.