Director Guy Ritchie post-Aladdin has been hyper-focusing on a bunch of his own movies at Miramax, despite being loosely attached to helm an Aladdin sequel for Disney, he’s been spending more time putting together his own projects to avoid having to do the sequel.

His recent run includes the release of the Matthew McConaughey gangster pic The Gentlemen (being developed into a television series) and Jason Statham’s armored truck thriller Wrath of Man (a remake of the 2004 French film Le Convoyeur). Ritchie recently wrapped on a big globetrotting spy project, Operation Fortune (previously called Five Eyes), that stars folks such as Statham, Aubrey Plaza, Josh Hartnett, and Hugh Grant.

Deadline reports of a mysterious new film from Guy Ritchie at Miramax that will begin before the end of the year with American actor Jake Gyllenhaal in negotiations to take a lead role.

A title and plot details are unknown but given that casting is ramping up we’ll likely learn concrete information soon.

It’s a shocking development given that Ritchie had been developing a World War II action drama for Paramount Pictures, based on the novel The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare by Damien Lewis. Focusing on the first unit of British black ops commandos.

Previous drafts of the script were penned by Arash Amel, Paul Tamasy and Eric Johnson.

When France fell to the Nazis in 1940, Churchill declared that Britain would resist the advance of the German army–alone if necessary. Churchill commanded the Special Operations Executive to secretly develop of a very special kind of military unit that would operate on their own initiative deep behind enemy lines. The units would be licensed to kill, fully deniable by the British government, and a ruthless force to meet the advancing Germans. The very first of these “butcher-and-bolt” units–the innocuously named Maid Honour Force–was led by Gus March-Phillipps, a wild British eccentric of high birth, and an aristocratic, handsome, and bloodthirsty young Danish warrior, Anders Lassen. Amped up on amphetamines, these assorted renegades and sociopaths undertook the very first of Churchill’s special operations–a top-secret, high-stakes mission to seize Nazi shipping in the far-distant port of Fernando Po, in West Africa.

Jake Gyllenhaal has been lining up a wave of genre pics including the war drama Combat Control and Image Comics movie Prophet with Extraction director Sam Hargrave involved with both projects. He’s also attached to star alongside actress Jessica Chastain in Netflix’s film adaptation of the video game The Division with Rawson Marshall Thurber (replacing David Leitch) directing, the graphic novel thriller Snow Blind from director Gustav Möller (The Guilty), and sci-fi film based on the Robert Kirkman (Invincible, The Walking Dead) comic Oblivion Song.

Operation Fortune: Ruse de guerre will officially hit theaters on January 21 and a trailer is likely coming within weeks.

SOURCE: DEADLINE