Ben Affleck and Matt Damon To Star in Director Ridley Scott's Revenge Thriller THE LAST DUEL

Ridley Scott is setting up his next film project, which is called The Last Duel. The film is based on a true revenge story that was told in a novel by Eric Jager. Matt Damon and Ben Affleck will star in the film and they also wrote the script with Nicole Holofcener.

This is the first script that Damon and Affleck have collaborated on since their Oscar winning work on Good Will Hunting. It’s actually pretty awesome to see these two guys have written another script and that they will re-team on the big screen.

According to Deadline, the revenge story is a period piece that follows two best friends, who will be played by Damon and Affleck. “One goes to war and returns to discover the other has raped the soldier’s wife. No one will believe the woman, and the soldier appeals to the king of France and says he wants to fight in a duel to the death, and if the other guy wins, he is innocent. It becomes the last legally sanctioned duel in France.”

The film project is moving forward fast and if Disney/Fox doesn’t pick it up, “every studio in town is waiting in the wings for this one.” What’s interesting about this movie, is that it deals with the same subject matter that Scott covered in his very first film, The Duellists, which told the story of two officers in the Napoleonic Era.

This actually sounds like it’ll be a great movie and with a team of talent like this coming together to bring it to life, there’s no doubt that it’s going to end up being a great movie!

Here’s the full detailed description of the story from the book:

When Jean de Carrouges, a Norman knight, returns from combat in Scotland to find his wife, Marguerite, accusing Jacques LeGris, her husband’s old friend and fellow courtier, of brutally raping her, the knight takes his cause before the teenage King Charles VI. Amid LeGris’s vociferous claims of innocence and doubts about the now pregnant Marguerite’s charges (and about the paternity of her child), the deadlocked court decrees a “trial by combat” that leaves her fate, too, in the balance. For if her husband and champion loses the duel, she will be put to death as a false accuser.

Carrouges and LeGris, in full armor, eventually meet on a walled field in Paris before a massive crowd that includes the king and many nobles of the realm. A fierce fight on horseback and then on foot ensues during which both combatants suffer wounds—but only one fatal. The violent and tragic episode was notorious in its own time because of the nature of the alleged crime, the legal impasse it provoked, and the resulting trial by combat, an ancient but increasingly suspect institution that was thereafter abolished.

The dramatic true story of the knight, the squire, and the lady unfolds in 1386, during the devastating Hundred Years War between France and England, as enemy troops pillage the land, madness haunts the French court, the Great Schism splits the Church, Muslim armies threaten Christendom, and rebellion, treachery, and plague turn the lives of all into toys of Fortune. Based on extensive research in Normandy and Paris, The Last Duel brings to life a colorful, turbulent age and three unforgettable characters caught in a fatal triangle of crime, scandal, and revenge. It is at once a moving human drama, a captivating detective story, and an engrossing work of historical intrigue.

Does this sound like a movie you’d be interested in seeing?