Too soon? Al Pacino to play Joe Paterno in movie

Well that didn't take long, did it? Do you want to know the best way to help twenty-something victims at the hands of pedophile get through all of the damaging moments of their life? Make a movie about it! Well, not about that specifically. Deadline has reported that ICM Partners is shopping a package for studios about former Penn State football head coach Joe Paterno, with Al Pacino attached to the project to play him. It will be based on The New York Times Bestseller biography Paterno, and Pacino's manager, Rick Nicita, will produce it.

According to Deadline, "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."

Okay, so it won't be entirely about the Jerry Sandusky scandal, but it's going to be there. This won't be the first time Pacino played a football coach. In the movie Any Given Sunday, he was a coach of a Miami professional football team. We all knew that a Joe Paterno movie would come sooner or later, I just expected later. I also pictured it as a TV movie or on HBO or Showtime. I just hope they treat the whole scenario with care. It's movie studios… what could go wrong?

You can follow Movies and Culture Editor Lance Liebl on Twitter @Lance_GZ

[Source: Deadline]