Crowe Enlists Damon to Run the ‘Zoo’

Not exactly the first actor when you think of comedy, it’s Matt Damon, and not the originally mentioned Ben Stiller who might be toplining Cameron Crowe’s long waited return since 2005’s Elizabethtown. THR is mentioning We Bought a Zoo in the same sentences the off-putting titles such as Marley & Me for its animal to humans quota and Crowe’s own Jerry Maguire for the similitudes in giving up a career and throwing oneself into a future that is uncertain. 20th Century Fox have tagged the drama/comedy with a Holiday release in 2011 – so you know where their marketing minds are at, but I’m curious about whether this is a studio favor – a do a Pearl Jam doc and then something to pass the time way of thinking before he tackles the Marvin Gaye biopic or the Columbia Pictures project that had Ben Stiller and Reese Withersppon attached. 

We Bought a Zoo is an adaptation of a memoir by Benjamin Mee, scripted by Aline Brosh McKenna (from The Devil Wears Prada fame) and rewritten by Crowe, Damon would portray Mee – I guess a middle aged man who used his life savings to buy a dilapidated zoo, replete with 200 exotic animals facing destruction, in the English countryside. Mee, along with his children, had to balance caring for his wife, who was dying of brain cancer, with dealing with escaped tigers, raising endangered animals, working with an eclectic skeleton crew and readying the zoo for a reopening.

Damon has a whopping four and perhaps five films due out this year: The Adjustment Bureau, Eastwood’s Hereafter, the Coen’s True Grit, does the narration on Charles Ferguson’s Inside Job and perhaps one day we’ll finally get to see Kenneth Lonergan’s Margaret. Julie Yorn is producing Zoo – she’s currently prepping Catherine Hardwicke’s Red Riding Hood.