Corona | Coming Attractions

The rumor du jour is that Spike Lee has been offered the directing job for Oldboy, the American remake of the Korean action-thriller and rewrote the rules on how a man gets his revenge.

The story comes from Twitch, and Lee's an intriguing candidate. Spike's not the kind of guy to attach himself to remakes and do-overs, so if he's been wooed by the material, it probably means that there's meat on the bone.

At one point the talk was that none other than Steven Spielberg wanted to helm the English language version with Will Smith to play the leading role, but that version of Oldboy collapsed into development hell four years ago.

For those not in the know, Oldboy was originally a 2003 Korean movie directed by Park Chan-wook. It's about a man who is kidnapped and held for 15 years inside a hotel room by anonymous captors, then suddenly let go one day. As the man tries to uncover the secrets behind who his captors were, he leaves a trail of broken bodies across the city. There's also a hefty twist that leaves the viewer squirming in their seat.