Ridley Scott’s Nottingham: Starring Russell Crowe & Russell Crowe

News about Nottingham - Ridley Scott’s Robin Hood story, not the horrible East Midlands town - has been a bit all over the shop lately.

First Nottingham was going to star Russell Crowe as a good Sheriff of Nottingham who had to battle the evil Robin Hood, then it wasn’t going to be made at all, but now it’s back on - and it’s got completely weird. Apparently in the new Nottingham, Russell Crowe is going to play the Sheriff of Nottingham and Robin Hood.

Not in a good way, either. In Nottingham, Russell Crowe’s character will be both the Sheriff of Nottingham and Robin Hood - news which will be profoundly disappointing to all of us hoping that Nottingham would feature a Double Impact-style scene where two identical Russell Crowes have a kung-fu fight with telephones in the woods in 12th Century England.

Russell Crowe and Ridley Scott have something of a mutual profession mancrush on each other. They’ve previously teamed up on Gladiator, A Good Year, American Gangster, Body Of Lies - in fact, we’re mostly convinced that if Russell Crowe was more than 15 years old when Alien was made, it would have been about Russell Crowe bursting out of Russell Crowe’s chest and then getting fired out of a spaceship by a grappling hook fired by Russell Crowe.

Anyway, the next movie that Russell Crowe and Ridley Scott are teaming up on will be Nottingham, their revisionist take on the legend of Robin Hood. Nottingham was to stray from the traditional Robin Hood tale in several ways - there’d be no tights, no Bryan Adams songs and Nottingham wouldn’t be 30 minutes from Dover on horseback. But most importantly, Nottingham would be a detective movie about Russell Crowe playing a hard-bitten Sheriff of Nottingham on the trail of the evil criminal Robin Hood.

That’s the way it was supposed to be, at least. But not too long ago, Nottingham was shelved - the blame being laid on the writers strike, the possibility of an actors strike and the seasonal ugliness of forests. However, now Nottingham is back on with one small difference.

In the new version of Nottingham, the Sheriff Of Nottingham is Robin Hood, and Russell Crowe gets to play everybody, even Friar Tuck and Maid Marion. Probably. MTV reports:

The news comes straight from the helmer himself, with Scott revealing “He’s playing both!” exclusively to MTV News. While Scott held additional details close to his chest — saying they would take too long to describe — he did exclaim that Crowe’s dual roles would be “a good old clever adjustment of characters. One becomes the other. It changes.”

What could this all mean? Does the Sheriff of Nottingham take to robbing people as a way of collecting taxes for the king? Is there going to a Tyler Durden-style schizophrenic reveal near the end of the movie? Or is it going to be the Double Impact thing? Oh, let it be the Double Impact thing, Ridley. There’s a tenner in it for you if you make it the Double Impact thing.

But however Russell Crowe will play the Sheriff of Nottingham and Robin Hood, let’s just all be grateful that Nottingham is actually getting made. It’s been too long since a decent Robin Hood movie has been made - plus we hear that Jay-Z has already recorded another American Gangster-style album inspired by the movie, and we wouldn’t want the world to be deprived of surefire would-be hits like H To The Izzood, Wenches Wenches Wenches and I Got 99 Problems (And Scurvy Accounts For 97 Of Them), would we.