After the fan-favorite Attack the Block, many were eager to see what star John Boyega would do next. His HBO project with Spike Lee didn't pan out, and few saw him opposite Chiwetel Ejiofor in Half of a Yellow Sun. Currently he's knocking them dead here at Sundance for the gritty drama, Imperial Dreams (which I'm heading out to see in a few minutes), but he's just landed a film that could do for him what 42 did for Chadwick Boseman.
Variety reports Boyega will play Olympic track star Jesse Owens in Race, a new biopic directed by Stephen Hopkins. The script by Anna Waterhouse and John Shrapnel will chronicle his upbringing as the son of an Alabama sharecropper to the winner of four gold medals at the 1936 Olympics, shattering Adolf Hitler's myth of an Aryan supremacy in the process.
Filming is set to begin in May, and it'll be interesting to see how this affects Disney's Owens biopic which only just gained Antoine Fuqua as director. Chances are there won't be room for both.
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