Salvador Dali three film headache

The actor Antonio Banderas, who is currently in talks about playing the lead role in a biopic of Salvador Dali (pictured), has just found out that Al Pacino is to portray the Spanish surrealist painter in another film.

The Banderas movie, Dali, will be directed by Simon West, best known for Lara Croft: Tomb Raider and the Oscar-nominated Black Hawk Down. But Pacino’s film, Dali & I: The Surreal Story, is not the only other Dali project, Robert Pattinson will also play Dali in a third film, Little Ashes, which will chronicle the artist's early life.

Needless to say, the Dali bonanza, reported in the Independent, is going to cause a good deal of confusion at the box office and is likely to give rise to all sorts of rivalries among the actors and production teams as they vie to get their respective movies noticed by the public.

It is not the first time big studios have clashed over similar projects. In June, Warner Brothers signed Guy Ritchie to direct an all-action film, Sherlock Holmes, with Robert Downey Jr as Holmes and Jude Law as Dr Watson. A month later, however, Columbia Pictures said it was planning a Sherlock Holmes comedy, starring Sacha Baron Cohen, of Borat fame, as the fictional English detective.