Gangster Squad, the next planned film for Zombieland director Ruben Fleischer, finally got the green light from Warner Bros. The studio currently eyes Sean Penn to play the film’s central character, mobster Mickey Cohen, and offered Ryan Gosling a role as a cop pitted against Cohen.
The official site for truTV describes Cohen as “Ben ‘Bugsy’ Siegel's shadow.” From the site:
“Mickey Cohen was Ben ‘Bugsy’ Siegel's shadow. Ben was tall, handsome, suave and welcome in the elite Hollywood circles. He mixed with the glitterati, courted royalty and bedded starlets while his shadow — Mickey — was picking their pockets, robbing their safes and breaking their bones.”
From that description, it’d be hard to imagine this film without Siegel, and according to Deadline Hollywood, the film pulls its narrative from journalist Paul Lieberman’s articles, so we’re hoping that this one stays relatively close to its source material.
Sean Penn always puts his most into his film work, so it’ll be exciting if he signs on to play Cohen. Likewise, Ryan Gosling worked his way from being a teen heartthrob to being a legitimate actor. Seeing the two of them working together in Gangster Squad would be awesome, even though the title of the film sounds like that of an awful cartoon. However, there isn’t enough info on Cicero to determine how much anticipation it merits.
Warner Bros. also looks to get a project based on Al Capone called Cicero off the ground. It seems that David Yates might want to begin that one after wrapping up the "Harry Potter" films, but there haven’t been any official negotiations yet.