Warner Bros. takes on two anti-poaching films from Leonardo DiCaprio, Tobey Maguire, and Tom Hardy

The major studios will usually bend themselves into a pretzel to not cannibalize their own projects. That means you'll rarely see two major features release too close to one another, and certainly the studio wouldn't dare develop two films on essentially the same subject. Warner Bros. is flipping the paradigm a little bit, though, with a pair of upcoming anti-poaching flicks from the awesome trio of Leonardo DiCaprio, Tom Hardy, and Tobey Maguire.

We actually learned about this back in August, but at the time we thought it was just one film, when in fact it's two different ones tackling the subject in different ways. The details all seem to be intact, just divided between the projects. The first one will be written by Sheldon Turner(Up in the Air), produced by DiCaprio and Maguire based on an idea Hardy dreamed up by Hardy and has him starring as an ex-Special Forces operative who joins a friend in training rangers and fighting poachers who are destroying the rhino and elephant populations in the Zimbabwe bush.

The second one seems less defined right now, but may feature appearances by all three actors. It's being described as in the vein of Steven Soderbergh's Traffic, and will take a multi-faceted look at the global market where parts of slain animals are sold and used for things like aphrodisiacs and status symbols. The untitled film has no writer or director attached yet, but we've these three involved I'm sure their phones will be ringing off the hook. [Deadline]