After nearly 40 years of various studios and the filmmaker attempting to get an adaptation of the neo-Western drama off the ground, Clint Eastwood’s Cry Macho is finally gearing up to come to audiences as Warner Bros. has set the film for an October 22 release.
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Based on N. Richard Nash’s novel fo the same name, the film stars Eastwood as a one-time rodeo star and washed up horse breeder who, in 1978, takes a job from an ex-boss to bring the man’s young son home and away from his alcoholic mom. Crossing rural Mexico on their back way to Texas, the unlikely pair faces an unexpectedly challenging journey, during which the world-weary horseman may find his own sense of redemption through teaching the boy what it means to be a good man.
Click here to purchase Nash’s original novel!
Alongside Eastwood, the cast for the film includes Eduardo Minett (Como dice el dicho), Dwight Yoakam (Wedding Crashers, Logan Lucky), Fernanda Urrejola (Narcos: Mexico, Party of Five), Horacio Garcia Rojas (Narcos: Mexico, Diablero), Alexandra Ruddy (City of Lies, Jersey Boys), Natalia Traven (Collateral Damage, Romancing the Bride), Ana Rey (Californication, No Good Nick) and Paul Lincoln Alayo (The Mule, Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.).
Eastwood directed the film on a screenplay by Nash and Nick Schenk, whom the Oscar-winning filmmaker previously worked with on his 2008 hit Gran Torino and his generally well-received 2018 crime drama The Mule, while also producing alongside Albert S. Ruddy, Tim Moore and Jessica Meier.
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Nash originally penned the novel as a screenplay rejected twice by 20th Century Fox before turning to novelization after his failed attempts, though would later sell the script multiple times to various studios. The attempts at adaptations saw various performers in talks to lead the film, including Roy Scheider, Burt Lancaster, Pierce Brosnan, Arnold Schwarzenegger and Eastwood, though he elected to skip adapting the novel to reprise his role as Dirty Harry for The Dead Pool and the Scheider-led film beginning production in 1991 but never being completed.
Schwarzenegger was later set to star in the film in 2011 after his time as Governor of California came to an end with Brad Furman (City of Lies) set in the director’s chair, though with the revelation of the scandal regarding an employee at his household and his subsequent divorce, the project was swiftly cancelled, with Eastwood coming back to produce, direct and star in an adaptation this past October.
