Robert Downey Jr. eyes lead role in Vertigo remake

Robert Downey Jr. is set to star in a remake of 'Vertigo'.

Paramount Pictures have acquired a reboot of Alfred Hitchcock's classic psychological thriller and it is seen as a potential starring vehicle for the 'Iron Man' star, who is producing the project with his wife Susan Downey for their Team Downey production company.

'Peaky Blinders' creator Steven Knight will write the screenplay for the new film after it was recently confirmed that he is committed to penning an untitled 'Star Wars' movie for Lucasfilm.

Robert has kept a low profile as an actor since featuring in the flop 'Dolittle' in 2020 and is next due to appear in Christopher Nolan's historical epic 'Oppenheimer' this summer.

The original 'Vertigo' was released in 1958 and starred James Stewart as John 'Scottie' Ferguson, a San Francisco police detective who retired due to a crippling fear of heights brought on by a severe case of vertigo.

When he's hired to tail an acquaintance's wife, Madeleine (Kim Novak), Scottie becomes obsessed with her – but his fear of heights renders him powerless to save her when she climbs the tower of a Spanish mission and plunges to her death.

After that, things get truly strange.

'Vertigo' divided critics when it was first released but began to gain recognition as a masterpiece by the 1980s.

In 1989, it was one of the first 25 movies selected by the Library of Congress for preservation in the United States National Film Registry for being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant".

A handful of Hitchcock films have been remade over the years but no American studio has attempted an outright remake of 'Vertigo' until now.