It’s for this reason that we’re excited to announce that it looks like they will be going head-to-head in a new film called The Current War.
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Jake Gyllenhaal and Benedict Cumberbatch are in talks to portray George Westinghouse and Thomas Edison in the Weinstein Co.’s period drama about the 19th-century feud over the future of electricity, EW has confirmed. Less aggressively self-promotional than Edison, and not as intriguingly weird as his colleague Nikola Tesla, Westinghouse nevertheless proved highly influential in “The War Of Currents”, fending off constant rumors that alternating current was a murderous, sparking genie, just waiting to burst into people’s homes and eat their children and dogs. Since then, Ben Stiller has flirted with the job, but now The Weinstein Company has Me And Earl And The Dying Girl’s Alfonso Gomez-Rejon considering the idea, potentially lining it up for him to work on after Collateral Beauty, which is set to shoot in the coming months.
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The film will be produced by Timur Bekmambetov (who was originally eyed to direct), along with Film Rites’ Steve Zaillian and Garrett Basch. Cumberbatch now stars in Lyndsey Turner’s production of Hamlet in London’s West End. The guy can even be seen in theaters now, playing the long-haired, cocky Scott Fischer in Everest. He’s attached to co-star in the Iraq War drama THE YELLOW BIRDS, and he’s now prepping to star as Marvel’s Sorcerer Supreme DOCTOR odd alongside an impressive supporting cast that includes Chiwetel Ejiofor, Tilda Swinton, Rachel McAdams, and Mads Mikkelsen.
