Al Pacino to Play Joe Paterno in Biopic

Oscar winner Al Pacino is attached to portray disgraced college football coaching legend Joe "Papa Joe" Paterno in an upcoming film on the Penn State scandal.

Pacino's agency ICM is putting together a package of talent in the coming days to shop the project to studios.

The film is based on sportswriter Joe Posnanski’s best-selling biography Paterno. Pacino’s manager Rick Nicita will produce.

As Deadline reports, "The narrative arc of the movie that will be shopped is obvious. A man becomes the winning-est coach in college football history and builds a powerhouse football program that turns him into a campus deity. When his former defensive coordinator Jerry Sandusky is revealed to be a pedophile whom a graduate assistant witnessed raping a boy in the locker room showers and it comes out that Paterno was told and help hide the scandal and never called the police, Paterno was summarily fired. He died shortly after."

Pacino previously portrayed a football coach in Oliver Stone's Any Given Sunday:

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Freeman, Banks Give Voice to Lego Movie

Oscar winner Morgan Freeman, who played Lucius Fox in Nolan's Batman trilogy, will once again cross paths with the Caped Crusader onscreen ... this time in LEGO form.

Deadline reports that both Freeman and The Hunger Games' Elizabeth Banks have been added to the voice cast of Warners' animated LEGO Movie. They join Chris Pratt and Will Arnett, who play the movie's protagonist and a LEGO version of Batman, respectively.

No word on Banks' role, but Freeman's character is said to be named "Vitruvius," which also just so happens to be the name of an ancient Roman author of a multi-volume work on architecture (a fitting subject for LEGO).

The movie will be directed by 21 Jump Street's Phil Lord and Chris Miller. Lord recently described the film as the story of "a young man who doesn't have a creative bone in his body and [he] has to always build things from the instructions. ... He's an 'instructions worker.' In the LEGO city, they build buildings, and it turns out in this universe it's illegal to build apart from the instructions. So what he finds out is that he's actually [a] descendant from these like super creative Jedi-type people who are called 'Master Builders' and he has been charged with saving the universe from being frozen together by an evil bad guy, so over the course of the movie he has to unlearn all of that lame-o, uncreative stuff and learn how to build without all of the instructions in order to save the universe."

The LEGO Movie opens February 28, 2014.

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