Sandra Bullock Breaks Into an All-Female ‘Ocean’s 11’ Reboot

It is a slightly less bad day to be a woman in the entertainment industry. It was a bold move when Paul Feig announced that he’d direct a reboot of Ghostbusters with a female-led cast a little over a year ago, but now that the murmurs of controversy and impotent whining about “ruined childhoods” have both died down, it’s one of 2016’s most hotly anticipated comedies. It’s a little astonishing: it’s almost as if audiences have found a way to get excited about a new comedy from a proven director of comic ensembles with a stable of extremely gifted comedic performers, even if all those performers might also have double-X chromosomes.

Riding the crest of this new wave of female-led studio vehicles comes a reboot/remake/reimagining/rework/revision of Ocean’s 11 with an all-lady cast of charismatic robbers. Today, The Playlist has the exclusive that Sandra Bullock will star in the distaff version of the 1960 heist film, already remade in the early 2000s with a cast of telegenic A-listers. Though the other Ocean’s ten still have yet to be announced, the item does confirm that Gary Ross, director of The Hunger Games, Pleasantville, and Seabiscuit will take the helm of film and that he’ll work from a script written by Olivia Milch, scribe of the thriller Queen & Country. The Playlist indicates that this project has been in the works for about a year, having been one of the last projects undertaken by now-deceased producer Jerry Weintraub, with his work now being carried on by George Clooney and Steven Soderbergh, the star and director of the most recent Ocean’s 11 remake.

Audiences shouldn’t expect Bullock to take on some role to the effect of Danielle Ocean for the new film, seeing as Clooney has been rumored to make a cameo in his old role as Danny Ocean. But this will still be a project to keep a close eye on in the months to come. This represents another heartening blow in a battle for increased representation for women onscreen in Hollywood. The first battle, that is, existing at all, has been won. Now all that’s left is for these films to show that they’re actually good.