In a movie climate that’s mostly concerned with alien invasions and superhero showdowns, we haven’t gotten a good, old-fashioned man vs. nature disaster movie in a while. So, in tribute to the summer that brought us both Deep Impact and Armageddon, and the summer that brought us both Dante’s Peak and Volcano, Hollywood now has two movies about climbing Mount Everest in development. The first one, that we’ve already heard about, is called Everest, it’s going to be directed by Doug Liman, and it stars Tom Hardy as George Mallory, a British man who tried to scale Everest three times in the 1920s and eventually died on the mountain.
Deadline has the rundown of the second Everest film that’s now being developed. It, confusingly, is also going by the simple title of Everest, but it’s going to tell the much more recent tale of a big winter storm that hit the mountain in 1996, while there were three different ongoing climbing expeditions, and led to the death of eight people. Baltasar Kormákur (Contraband) is set to direct the film, which shouldn’t be much of a stretch for him, given the fact that he made a stranded in Arctic waters movie called The Deep last year. The big news though is that Christian Bale is in early talks to star in the film, which should give it the star power necessary to go up against a dueling mountain movie that stars Tom Hardy.
Screw Batman vs. Bane, this could be the real moment of truth. Hardy vs. Bale: who’s man enough to not only scale the mountain, but also make the journey interesting enough that you want to buy a ticket? And will either of these movies have what it takes to top the true mountain climbing classic, Cliffhanger?