Because apparently somebody at Dreamworks got the wild hair up their ass that they needed their own movie franchise to compete with the Fast and the Furious series, Deadline is now reporting that the studio is on the verge of brokering a deal with EA for the rights to Need for Speed franchise.
The deal isn't done, but Deadline says that Dreamworks is in "pole position"--no, seriously, they actually wrote those words down and published them--to land the deal. The movie will come courtesy of John and George Gatins, the writer of Real Steel and the producer of She's Out of My League, respectively. Though this time, they apparently will be going with George as writer, and John as producer. So, this should go well.
Given that Need for Speed is something of a nebulous franchise, narratively speaking, one could be forgiven for wondering where, exactly, the hell anyone plans to pull a story out of a series that's covered everything from gritty, urban street racing to gritty, urban Cannonball Run. SlashFilm posits that perhaps Dreamworks is just buying the name for brand cachet, and plans to craft its own specific narrative. That sounds likely and reasonable, but instead I'm going to get my hopes unrealistically up and demand that this be the two hour docudrama on the life of Razor Callahan I've been secretly hoping and praying for ever since I was first informed that Razor Callahan was a thing that existed.
C'mon, this movie practically writes itself. Specifically, it wrote itself back in 2001 and was called The Fast and the Furious.