The actor Michael B Jordan wanted to be the Al Pacino to his Robert De Niro
Ah, the movie bromance. There have been many down the years, great male partnerships, double acts, sometimes with each other, sometimes against each other.
From Paul Newman and Robert Redford in The Sting to Jon Favreau and Vince Vaughn in Swingers, when guys get together with some chemistry, magic happens. And the same might well be in the future for Michael B Jordan and Jonathan Majors.
The pair first got together for Creed III in 2023 and hit it off so well that they both expressed interest in making several future movies together, hoping to make the partnership one that could prove to be as influential as some of the very best to ever do it.
Asked during press for the boxing movie at the time if it would likely be the first of many collaborations, Jordan said, “It is. We plan on it.”
While Majors added, optimistically: “De Niro and Pacino.”
Jordan, who recently played opposite himself to jaw-dropping effect in the Ryan Coogler horror Sinners, certainly wasn’t overawed by that idea, continuing: “We’re excited about that, and I have those conversations with him. Acting is such a solo journey, where you’re fighting for your place on that call sheet for such a long time. So when you’ve got somebody that doesn’t care as much about that stuff, it’s like, ‘Let’s go. How much damage can we do together?’”
Majors, for his part, actually pre-empted Jordan’s work on Sinners back in 2020 when he appeared as the lead in HBO’s Lovecraft Country, which dealt with many of the same themes as he portrayed a young man travelling through segregated 1950s America trying to find his father while plagued by supernatural monsters.
Although it was cancelled after just one season, the show received considerable acclaim from critics and Majors went on to appear in the likes of Marvel’s Ant Man and the Wasp: Quantumania and Loki aside from matching up with Jordan in the third part of the Creed trilogy.
Of course, the Pacino and De Niro twosome they refer to is thanks to not only being two of the finest actors in history individually, but also the four movies they have made together, starting with The Godfather Part Two in 1974, but most memorably in Michael Mann’s Heat in 1995.
They also paired up less successfully in the 2008 thriller Righteous Kill, which got roundly panned on release, but bounced back in some style for Martin Scorsese’s epic crime drama The Irishman in 2019, which picked up ten Oscar nominations.
If you’d like to watch a movie that features a very early Al Pacino double act, this time with the late great Gene Hackman, then track down Scarecrow from 1973, which is a terrific, little-known road movie with two superb central performances, especially from a young Pacino as the naive and innocent former sailor who Hackman starts off hating but eventually warms to.
Michael B Jordan, meanwhile, will continue his ascent to the top of the industry by following Sinners up with a raft of major movies, including another Creed, a Thomas Crown Affair reboot, a rumoured remake of Miami Vice and an adaptation of the best-selling video game Rainbow Six. He has also had in-depth discussions with Will Smith about shooting a sequel to the post-apocalyptic sci-fi thriller I Am Legend.
