Harrison Ford to play cowboy Wyatt Earp in Black Hats

Harrison Ford will play Wyatt Earp in an adaptation of Max Allan Collins' novel, Black Hats .

The novel takes artistic liberties with Earp's life story, positing that he spent his final years as a private detective and movie consultant in LA.

When he discovers that Doc Holliday's son is in trouble with notorious gangster Al Capone, Earp reteams with one of his former deputies to take on the mob.

The big stylistic sell here (which apparently caught Ford's interest) is the concept of the grizzled gunslinger tackling '20s mobsters.

Ford will be seen donning a Stetson and wielding a six-shooter in this summer's sci-fi western mash-up Cowboys & Aliens , so presumably he must have enjoyed messing with the iconic genre's tropes.

Max Allan Collins also wrote the graphic novel on which Road To Perdition was based. Black Hats has landed a white-hot screenwriter in the form of Kurt Johnstad.

Johnstad wrote the script for 300 , and he's currently scribbling away on prequel Battle Of Artemisia . He has also written The Last Photograph , and he has recently been engaged to rewrite the script for Zack Snyder's Man Of Steel .

Matt Maytum
Editor, Total Film

I'm the Editor at Total Film magazine, overseeing the running of the mag, and generally obsessing over all things Nolan, Kubrick and Pixar. Over the past decade I've worked in various roles for TF online and in print, including at 12DOVE, and you can often hear me nattering on the Inside Total Film podcast. Bucket-list-ticking career highlights have included reporting from the set of Tenet and Avengers: Infinity War, as well as covering Comic-Con, TIFF and the Sundance Film Festival.