Diesel to Become "The Wheelman"
Action star Vin Diesel will once again blast onto the silver screen in "The Wheelman," based on a newly released videogame with a damsel in distress plot.
Paramount Pictures is putting Fast and Furious star Vin Diesel back on the silver screen and behind the wheel yet again in The Wheelman, a film version of the Ubisoft videogame.
According to an article in Variety, "Studio has set John Singleton to direct and Lorenzo di Bonaventura to produce 'The Wheelman,' a live-adaptation of the Ubisoft vidgame 'Wheelman.' The videogame launched last month, with Diesel as its main character and the game's producer."
In the movie, Diesel will play a professional driver who comes out of retirement to safeguard a woman from his past. Rich Wilkes wrote the script but Oliver Butcher and Stephen Cornwell did a rewrite. Di Bonaventura will produce along with Diesel and his One Race Films partner, Samantha Vincent.
Paramount first became involved with the project back in 2006 when the partnership was being hailed as one of the largest between a videogame publisher and a movie studio.
The Variety article goes on to say, "Sumner Redstone owned both Midway Games and Paramount, and the plan was to launch the 'Wheelman' game and movie in close proximity.'"
With Singleton in the director's chair, The Wheelman certainly will not be lacking in car chases given that Singleton directed the sequel to Fast and Furious aptly entitled, 2 Fast 2 Furious.
As for Di Bonaventura, he produced two big budget films that are sure to pack in moviegoers. One being the sequel to the 2007 smash Transformers, entitled Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, set to be released on June 24 and G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra, which is set to be released in early August.
