Brazilian director Jose Padilha [Elite Squad] was yesterday named as one of the 8 candidates to direct The Wolverine, the sequel to Fox's 2009 X-Men Origins: Wolverine. Padilha has also recently been attached to helm the long-gestating reboot of RoboCop for MGM. Today its emerged that the director is also poised to direct the political action film Tri-Border. This as it turns out may not be good news for Kathryn Bigelow.
The film being scripted by Gran Torino writer Nick Schenk will be shot in English and takes place in the infamous lawless South American zone trisected by Brazil, Argentina and Paraguay, where competing crime organizations and law enforcement agencies fight for the upper hand. THR reports that the film centers on a Boston based DEA agent who gets reassigned to Paraguay after busting the son of a US senator in a drug deal so in order to capture his ticket back home he is tasked with taking down a leading drug dealer. Writer Schenk stated, "How can you write about something like the tri-border area without ever seeing it first hand? I've learned that landlocked Paraguay has a Navy. I've also learned that the Brazilian Federal Police and the Paraguayan Navy commonly exchange gunfire on the river that separates the two countries." This may not be good news for director Kathryn Bigelow whose film Triple Frontier, the project she announced as her follow up to The Hurt Locker may be dead in the water. Bigelow stated that Triple Frontier was her next film following winning the Best Director Oscar in 2009 but subsequently she put the project on the back-burner as she tackled her upcoming Bin Laden project. Padilha is also self-financing Tri-Border.
