As far back as 2004, Vari­ety reported that Jerry Bruck­heimer, world famous pro­ducer behind films such as Black Hawk Down and Pirates of the Caribbean, was nego­ti­at­ing a “seven fig­ure” deal to obtain the movie rights to Ubisoft’s Prince of Per­sia fran­chise — whilst the film itself would fall to Dis­ney to develop.

It was also reported that Jor­dan Mech­ner, behind the sto­ry­lines in the video games, would be work­ing on the scripts first drafts, with John August (Big Fish, Go) super­vis­ing and exec­u­tive pro­duc­ing. Mike Sten­son and Chad Oman are also exec­u­tive producers.

Those look­ing for a faith­ful adap­ta­tion of the fran­chise might be a lit­tle dis­ap­pointed, Mechner’s first quote states, “Rather than do a straight beat-for-beat adap­ta­tion of the new videogame, we’re tak­ing some cool ele­ments from the game and using them to craft a new story — much as ‘Pirates’ did with the theme park ride.”

Cool ele­ments sounds omi­nous. The arti­cle goes on to liken the Prince with Indi­ana Jones and the par­al­lels are clear; dun­geons, sand, the 9th cen­tury (oh wait). What was one of the last Disney/Bruckheimer part­ner­ships? The bril­liant (this is sar­casm) King Arthur.