Robert Ludlum's The Matarese Circle to Star Tom Cruise and Denzel Washington!

[GreenScar]

This is really getting interesting. The movie is being fast tracked for a 2010 release:

This project has definitely bumped up a notch in terms of anticipation. Tom Cruise will be joining Denzel Washington
in MGM's adaptation of Robert Ludlum's The Matarese Circle that is being directed by David Cronenberg and written by Wanted scribes Derek Haas and Michael Brandt. That means we get to see all three of them - Cruise, Washington, Cronenberg - working on a big-budget spy thriller in the vein of The Bourne Identity
. Excited yet? Cruise is in final negotiations to take on the role of the Russian spy Vasili Taleniekov, mortal enemy of American CIA operative Brandon Scofield, to be played by Washington.

The Matarese Circle will now be Tom Cruise's next project, before he even starts shooting The Tourist. Production is expected to begin sometime later this year. Novelist Robert Ludlum, also known for his Bourne series of books, drew inspiration from David Rockefeller's Trilateral Commission in the 1970s to write The Matarese Circle. But Haas and Brandt have updated the setting from the Cold War to modern times. It follows the two arch-enemy spies who are forced into a distrustful collaboration against a wide-reaching political conspiracy orchestrated by a mysterious organization called the Matarese.