Al Pacino and Robert De Niro are teaming up for real this time.
More than a decade after sharing top billing but only brief screen time together in the cops-and-robbers thriller Heat, the Oscar-winning pals have committed to a new film in which they'll play New York detectives on the trail of a serial killer.
The independently financed project, titled Righteous Kill, was announced in Cannes. The caper, penned by Inside Man scribe Russell Gewirtz, will be directed by Jon Avnet, the veteran helmer behind such relationship-driven fare as Fried Green Tomatoes, The War, and Up Close and Personal. His next feature is the upcoming real-time thriller 88 Minutes, starring Pacino as a man who has the titular time to solve his own impending murder.
According to trade reports, Pacino and De Niro agreed to the film after delicate negotiations between both side's camps.
Budgeted at $60 million, Kill will be produced by Nu Image's Millennium Films' Avi Lerner and Randall Emmett of Emmett/Furla Films, which teamed to produce 88 Minutes. That close alliance is partly what enticed the megastars, who had been reportedly looking for another project to do together for a few years now.
"You see these two icons onscreen together for virtually the whole film, [something] never seen before in the history of cinema," Lerner told the Hollywood Reporter. "It's one of the hardest deals we've ever done to put these two actors together."
The previous cinematic collaborations between Pacino and De Niro hardly saw them acting in the same room together, let alone the same time period. Their first coheadlining roles came in The Godfather Part II, but they never interacted: De Niro played a young, pre-Brando Vito Corleone growing up an Italian immigrant in 1920s New York, while Pacino reprised his part as son Michael, who takes over the family business in the 1970s.
Their second teaming was in 1995's Heat, when De Niro's master thief briefly meets Pacino's hard-nosed detective in a fancy restaurant and later during an underwhelming final pursuit. Filmmakers hope the sparks will fly when the two actors—arguably the best of their generation—play off each other throughout a movie.
De Niro is currently shooting the Barry Levinson comedy What Just Happened?, in which he plays a Hollywood bigwig. He has several other projects in the works, including the legal drama Sugarland, directed and costarring Jodie Foster, the comedy First Man, where he plays hubby to Meryl Streep's president, and another go-round as Ben Stiller's father-in-law in the Meet the Fockers' sequel, Little Focker.
De Niro next appears on the big screen opposite Michelle Pfeiffer in the fantasy fable Stardust, due out in August.
As for Pacino, he's the latest mark for George Clooney, Brad Pitt, Matt Damon and crew in next month's Ocean's Thirteen. Also in the pipeline: Dali & I: The Surreal Story, in which he'll play the surrealist painter, and the currently filming heist thriller Rififi.
He's also in talks to reprise his Heat role alongside De Niro and Val Kilmer in a videogame version.
No word yet on which Hollywood studios are angling to distribute Righteous Kill. The film is set to begin shooting in New York and Connecticut in August and is targeting a 2008 release.