Steven Spielberg’s next movie will be Indiana Jones 5, which is currently due out July 10, 2020. We previously reported that Spielberg would follow Indy with a remake of West Side Story and he was currently casting the lead roles. However, Variety now reports that Spielberg might be shuffling up his slate. He recently held a table read for an untitled biopic about famous composer Leonard Bernstein, who wrote the music for West Side Story. Bernstein was also a closeted homosexual who had a complicated marriage with Chilean-born American actress Felicia Cohn Montealegre. Obviously a giant of American music, a Bernstein biopic is a story worth telling with the kind of personal touches that could make for compelling drama.

But the Bernstein biopic isn’t set in stone. Variety says that this is just Spielberg’s process for how he decides on what to do next. For example, he was going to follow up Ready Player One with The Kidnapping of Edgardo Mortara, but that petered out when he couldn’t find a suitable young actor to play Mortara, so he moved on to direct The Post instead. A similar situation is happening with West Side Story, not in that Spielberg is moving on, but that the Bernstein biopic may come together a little faster, in which case West Side Story would come second.

Either way, Variety notes that whatever film he goes with as his follow-up to Indiana Jones 5, he won’t shoot another movie until the beginning of 2019, and he’ll be using the rest of 2018 to prep. Personally, I’m fine with whatever Spielberg wants to do, and certainly find West Side Story and a Leonard Bernstein biopic as intriguing projects for the director. However, it remains to be seen how much of 2019 he'll spend on Indiana Jones before moving on to a follow-up.

Spielberg’s new movie, Ready Player One, will premiere at SXSW before opening on March 28th.

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Image via 20th Century Fox
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Image via DreamWorks
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Image via Disney