COWBOYS & ALIENS For Robert Downey Jr. & Jon Favreau?

UPDATE: Hollywood Reporter said COWBOYS & ALIENS is indeed going to be Favreau’s next directing gig

We might have to kiss the dream of seeing director Jon Favreau helming The Avengers goodbye. If the following info is happening, then Favreau and Robert Downey Jr. are teaming up again but that’s probably as good as the story’s gonna get. Variety has spoken and those two forces behind IRON MAN 2 (opens May 7th, 2010) may be looking into working together for the live action adaptation of COWBOYS & ALIENS.

Last year, Downey Jr. signed on for the project and this has been one of those projects that Hollywood has always wanted to make since the rights were acquired by Universal and DreamWorks with Steve Oedekerk set to write and direct but the project then moved to Columbia Pictures and Escape Artists, and then back to U and DreamWorks, and the report said at least 7 writers or writer teams have tried to tackle it.

Now Dreamworks and Paramount will co-finance, they want production to start in 2010 and Paramount may come in a distributor. Star Trek writers, Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman along with Damon Lindeloff have been rewriting the script.
it’s a mix of the sci-fi and Western genres based on a graphic novel written by Fred Van Lente and Andrew Foley from an original idea by Rosenberg. The story centers on an Old West battle between the Apache and Western settlers, including a former Union Army gunslinger named Zeke Jackson (Downey), that is interrupted by a spaceship crashing into the prairie near Silver City, Ariz.

The good part of this is that the report ended with a reminder that Robert Downey Jr. and Jon Favreau will eventually work on IRON MAN 3. So it’s a definite will, not like last year where they had salary disagreements for months with Marvel.