Brad Pitt and Jennifer Aniston have been living separate lives. Now they're finally moving on to separate (production) houses.
After their split three years ago, the ex-golden couple continued to collaborate on projects in development at their Plan B production company. While Pitt is sticking with the former joint, teaming with Paramount to shepherd an Amazon-set adventure flick, Aniston and her new producing partner, Kristin Hahn, have inked a deal with Universal Pictures to develop projects for The Break-Up star's Echo Films banner.
According to Variety, Pitt's crew has acquired the film rights to Lost City of Z, an unpublished nonfiction book by author David Grann chronicling British explorer Col. Percy Harrison Fawcett's ill-fated quest to find the legendary city of Z in the Amazon rain forest.
Fawcett's party vanished without a trace in 1925, leading to several subsequent expeditions to find the missing adventurers. Grann's book is based on his own Indiana Jones-like journey, which he originally chronicled in a 2005 article for the New Yorker. The book version is due to be published by Doubleday next February.
Pitt is also considering playing the Grann character in the film.
The actor is keeping himself busy. He is currently in Texas dodging Brangelina wedding rumors and shooting Terrence Malick's Tree of Life. Lost City is one of several potential follow-ups, along with Darren Aronofsky's pugilism picture The Fighter and a big-screen take on Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged, which could reunite him onscreen with Angelina Jolie.
Per IMDb, he's also attached to the AIDS drama Dallas Buyer's Club, the meta-comedy Chad Schmidt (playing an amateur actor who bears an uncanny resemblance to a certain Brad Pitt) and the Watergate-era drama Dirty Tricks.
Pitt next appears in theaters in the Coen brothers' CIA-skewering comedy Burn After Reading, followed by David Fincher's adaptation of F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Curious Case of Benjamin Button.
As for Aniston, her Echo Films has several potential starring vehicles in the pipeline.
Among them: Counter Clockwise, based on the true story of a Harvard professor who attempts to reverse the aging process; Love: Todd, a drama about a tennis pro who gets more than she bargains for while coaching a rising teen phenom; Getting Rid of Matthew, about a publicist who has an affair with a married man only to fall for his oldest son; The Divorce Party, the story of a couple who mark their 35th anniversary by holding a bash to announce they're splitting up; Chemistry, a dramedy about love and obsessive-compulsive disorder; and The Goree Girls, based on the true story about an innocent woman in a Texas prison who starts one of the first all-female bands.
"We're drawn to stories about people finding their voice and finding their way, because they help us as listeners and viewers do what we feel we're all trying to do, which is making sense of our lives through the stories of others," Aniston told Variety. "That's why we chose the name Echo, to echo back an idea, a challenge, something that resonates through all of us."
Aniston is currently finishing up work on the dogcentric comedy Marley & Me, costarring Owen Wilson.