Pass The Popcorn: Don Cheadle To Direct And Star In Miles Davis Biopic

Welp, another day, another musician's legacy immortalized by the biopic treatment. Today it was announced that the long-rumored Miles Davis biopic is finally making its way to a camera near you and it will be spearheaded by the man that's been rallying studios up and down the Pacific coast to get behind the project; none other than Don Cheadle. The actor will star as the jazz great and the project will mark his directorial debut of a script that he also helped pen along with Steven Baigelman. Other actors tapped for the project include Ewan McGregor as a Rolling Stone reporter and Zoe Saldana as Miles' former wife Frances.

Tentatively titled Kill The Trumpet Player, the film will focus on Miles' triumphant return to music in 1979. After a drug-adled decade and a hiatus that left him unable to fulfill his contractual obligation to Columbia, Miles returned to the industry to find that most of his contemporaries had moved on to new wave and various commercial fusion/funk off-shoots. All of which gave him the freedom to adopt younger players like famed bassist Marcus Miller and saxophonist Bill Evans (which also facilitated a few performances with Prince later in that decade.) Kill The Trumpet Player is the cherry on top of a year that's been riddled with announcements of biopic films for legends like Jimi Hendrix, Marvin Gaye, James Brown, Ol' Dirty Bastard, Tupac and Nina Simone. Some of these seem less likely to manifest than others, but KTTP looks poised to actually come to fruition. So here' to hoping that all of these incredible biopics get done, and done right, as all of these legacies could use a cinematic bridge to a younger generation. We'll have more information on the film as we creep closer to its June shoot date.