Clint Eastwood’s classic western A Fistful Of Dollars is officially being remade 60 years after it first bowed in theaters.
Directed by Italian filmmaker Sergio Leone, the original movie was a pioneer in the ‘spaghetti western’ genre and spawned a whole trilogy of Dollars movies.
Eastwood – who turned 94 this May – starred as a mysterious gunslinger called the Man With No Name, marking his first leading role in a motion picture.
Now the 1964 feature has a remake in development from Euro Gang Entertainment, though no stars or writers have yet been publicly attached to the project.
Jolly Film, an Italian production company that helped back the original movie, is also one of the outfits behind the new version, according to Deadline.
The original was released in both English and Italian, but it is currently unknown whether the remake will be in one or both of the languages.
In the 1964 version of A Fistful Of Dollars, the Man With No Name arrives in a border town between the United States and Mexico and wreaks havoc.
He inserts himself into a feud between two local smuggling families, the Rojos and the Baxters, and takes advantage their battle of wills to extract a profit for himself.
The film is widely regarded as an uncredited remake of the 1961 samurai movie Yojimbo, helmed by the legendary Japanese director Akira Kurosawa.
Kurosawa’s work had already proven fertile ground as inspiration for westerns, as his 1954 epic Seven Samurai was the basis for the 1960 feature The Magnificent Seven.
Eastwood and Leone went on to make two sequels to A Fistful Of Dollars – For A Few Dollars More in 1965 and The Good, The Bad And The Ugly in 1966.
A Fistful Of Dollars was released five years after Eastwood got his big break as an actor on the successful western series Rawhide.
His star rose with such roles as the Man With No Name in the Dollars Trilogy, as well as the title character in the bad cop classic Dirty Harry.
In 1971, the year Dirty Harry was released, he also made his directorial debut with the thriller Play Misty For Me, starring him opposite Jessica Walter and Donna Mills.
It emerged this April that Eastwood has completed Juror No. 2, which is rumored to be the final movie the legendary filmmaker will direct.
The Unforgiven star – who was seen looking frail this March – cast Nicholas Hoult as a man who comes to a chilling realization while sitting on a jury.
Gradually, it dawns on the character that he may have been culpable in the car accident that killed the person whose homicide is being tried.
He finds himself in the nail-biting position of having to decide whether to keep his own name clear or help the innocent defendant get acquitted.
Postproduction wrapped on the movie in the spring, and sources told Variety that its studio, Warner Bros, was ‘thrilled’ by the footage it was shown.
Hoult is at the head of a formidable cast that includes Toni Collette, Zoey Deutch, Kiefer Sutherland, JK Simmons, Leslie Bibb and Chris Messina.
The movie had a tumultuous road to completion, as the shoot had to be stopped for months last year because of the Hollywood strikes.
Furthermore, a number of studios reportedly rejected the project before Eastwood was able to find it a home at Warner Bros.