Ben Foster Will Play Lance Armstrong for Director Stephen Frears

Not sure when it became a race (No pun intended) for competing Lance Armstrong biopics. But that's the thing. Hollywood loves a race. See who can be the first out the gate with similar-subject films. The unofficial rule is if the film that gets made first succeeds, the other versions will never happen. Why bother when someone else took the same basic material and beat you to the punch? And if it fails, the other versions will also never transpire. Why bother when the other guy who got it done first failed miserably?

That's what faces the afore-mentioned Armstrong biopics in development. One iteration is set up at Paramount and Bad Robot, with Bradley Cooper (depending on who you believe) and another at Warner Brothers for director Jay Roach (The Campaign) and screenwriter Scott Z. Burns (Contagion). And just to make things interesting, why not a third director throwing his name in the hat? And while we're at it, he has his star set.

"TOLDJA" says Stephen Frears (The Queen) will direct Ben Foster in their own biopic. Foster started out as a child-actor who was raised right and didn't become a tabloid-favorite fuck up. Instead he's become a respectable character actor. You've seen him around. He has the intensity to sell the publicly-shamed athlete as the bastard he was said to be behind closed doors. I wouldn't have had the smarts to think of Foster. Well done, Frears.

If everything works out, production could begin as soon as this fall.