Ben Affleck is quickly becoming a Warner Brothers favorite.  With The Town (which Warner Bros. distributed) garnering approximately $50 million at the box office as of last weekend and with it enjoying even greater critical success (currently rocking a 94% on Rotten Tomatoes), the studio has now offered Affleck the director’s chair for the L.A. crime drama Tales from the Gangster Squad.  The script, penned by Castle writer and former L.A. cop Will Beall, tells the story of an off-the-record gang of LAPD officers who attempt to force legendary gangster Micky Cohen out of town in the late 1940s.  The script draws substantially from the 2008 series of articles, also entitled Tales from the Gangster Squad, written by Los Angeles Times reporter Paul Lieberman.

As for Affleck, we recently reported that he had discussed directing (along with most every other director in the known universe) The Man of Steel for Warner Brothers but had dropped out of the running.  According to Vulture, the momentum-inclined director is also mulling over the possibility of directing Howard Gordon’s (24) Showtime pilot Homeland as well as a “two-hander at Warner Bros. that might star his old pal Matt Damon.”

I think the following week should be called “7 Days with Producer Dan Lin”.  That’s because when I was in London a few days ago, I spoke at length with the Sherlock Holmes producer about not only his latest film, but everything he has in development.  Trust me, if you’re interested in anything on Dan Lin’s IMDb page, over the next few days I’ll be able to provide an update.  But since it was such a wide ranging interview, I’ve decided to post it over the next week as separate articles almost every night.  At least that’s the plan.

So to kick off “7 Days with Producer Dan Lin,” let’s start with the Lego movie and Gangster Squad.  The big info is he thinks both of these projects are moving forward very quickly in the development cycle.

Regarding Lego, Lin says they’re “talking to several directors right now.”  He also says the film should be rated PG, he hopes to be making it in 2010, and he describes how the Denmark company is involved in the film, plus a few more details on the movie.

On Gangster Squad, Lin says they are getting a draft of the script the first week of January and it’s based on the series of L.A. Times articles by Paul Lieberman.  According to Lin, “It’s something based off of a real-life story. Will Bell, an ex-LAPD cop, is writing it. And it’s about when the gangsters had taken over the east coast. They’d taken over New York. They’d taken over Chicago. Bugsy Siegel was a big gangster at the time and they sent out Mickey Cohen to take over L.A. And Gangster Squad is about a group of rag-tag cops that were put together to take down the mob and take down Mickey Cohen. And their motto was ‘justice or just us’.”  Much more after the jump: