Deadline is reporting that director Marc Forster (Monster’s Ball, World War Z) has signed on to develop a trilogy of movies based around The Downslope, an unproduced screenplay from Stanley Kubrick, which was written in 1956. Forster will direct the first film in the series, as well as producing all three.
An anti-war tale based upon real historical events, The Downslope “focuses on a bitter, strategic series of Civil War battles in the Shenandoah Valley between young Union General George Armstrong Custer and Confederate Colonel John Singleton Mosby (known as the Gray Ghost for his stealth strategies). His cavalrymen, known as Mosby’s Rangers, continually outsmarted the much-larger enemy forces in a sequence of raids, which enraged Custer and eventually created a fierce cycle of revenge between the two men.”
The site reports that the subsequent films will expand Kubrick’s original story “and journey west, as postwar Americans settled the new frontier, delivering on the country’s unbending ambitions and dreams of Manifest Destiny.”
https://youtu.be/yIuEu1m0p2M?list=PL18yMRIfoszEaHYNDTy5C-cH9Oa2gN5ng
Originally published June 25, 2015. Updated April 14, 2018.
