After Green Zone failed at the box office, Greengrass has flirted with the Fantastic Voyage remake and came very close to getting his Martin Luther King biopic off the ground before that was scrapped. Despite being knocked down, he’s getting up again with two possible projects. The first is about pirates and the second is Rush, based on F1 legend Niki Lauda.

The former is not a film about a Disney theme park ride that gets progressively worse, but the real life tale of Captain Richard Phillips who was taken hostage by Somali pirates in 2009. SPOILER ALERT: he was rescued by US Naval Forces but the dramatic potential of the story is enough for Sony to bring it to the big screen. Tom Hanks is attached to the project, tentatively titled Maersk Alabama, and no we can’t pronounce the first word properly; with shooting likely to start later this year if everything goes swimmingly (geddit?).

If not, then he could turn to Rush, which details Niki Lauda’s near-fatal motoring session in 1976 that left him in a coma and without his right ear. Peter Morgan (The Queen, Hereafter) has been working on a script for Working Title which will also take into account Lauda’s rivalry with James Hunt. To be honest we hope he picks one quickish, it’s been too long since we’ve seen the classic Greengrass shaky-cam come into its own.