After essentially falling off the map for the better part of a decade, Shane Black was recently thrown a life raft by Marvel, who hired him to direct Iron Man 3. Unfortunately, since then, he still hasn’t been able to get another movie off the ground as of yet. He has been working on a Doc Savage movie over at Sony for at least a few years now, but it seems to be developing slowly. The good news is that he is now in the process of setting up another original film and it sounds like it should satisfy fans of Black’s previous work. There are also a couple of big names reportedly interested in the project. Hit the jump for more details.

According to The Wrap, Russell Crowe and Ryan Gosling are reportedly circling Shane Black’s upcoming film The Nice Guys. It’s still fairly early in the process and neither are officially attached, but if scheduling works out they could be on board. Joel Silver (Lethal Weapon) is producing via his Silver Pictures banner and plans to start shopping it to studios shortly.

Described as a noir-esque murder mystery, the story takes place in 1970s Los Angeles and “follows Jackson Healy (muscle-for-hire, recovering alcoholic) and Holland March (private eye, practicing alcoholic), who are brought together by the suicide of a fading porn star.” Black wrote the script a few years ago with Anthony Bagarozzi (who is also doing Doc Savage with him) and they held a live read in 2011 at the Austin Film Festival. It’s entirely possible that nothing will come of this, but at the moment it all sounds quite promising. Are you looking forward to The Nice Guys?