The first project under Robert Downey Jr.’s production banner Team Downey, the drama The Judge, was released earlier this year, and now another Team Downey film is moving closer to fruition.  Deadline reports that screenwriter Terry Rossio has been tapped to pen the script for the Warner Bros. treasure hunt film Yucatan, which is based on an original idea by iconic actor Steve McQueen and is being developed as a star vehicle for Downey Jr.  Rossio’s credits include co-writing the first three Pirates of the Caribbean films as well as the animated features Shrek and Aladdin, so he’s got plenty of experience in the adventure realm.  More on Yucatan after the jump.

Steve McQueen was developing Yucatan as a star vehicle for himself in the late 1960s, and after his death a 1700-page treatment for the film was discovered in two leather-bound trunks.  The original vision follows a renegade salvage expert on a quest to find a Mayan treasure in the Yucatan Peninsula.  Deadline reports that Rossio and Downey Jr. are using the initial premise as a jumping off point, but are making the project their own in what producer Susan Downey previously told us is a “great, wild, kind of action, sort of Inception-type of movie.”  Indeed, Deadline describes the project as “mind-bending”, so there does appear to be some sort of odd hook to the whole thing.

Downey Jr. is next set to co-star in the third Captain America film with Chris Evans, Captain America: Civil War.  The film will kick off a storyline that involves pitting the Marvel superheroes against each other, which keeps Downey Jr. in the Marvel fold without contracting him to more standalone Iron Man films.  It’s always possible he could return to Iron Man 4 sometime in the future, but he’s been quite keen on developing his own properties outside of Marvel as of late, and Yucatan certainly sounds like a rather interesting kind of project for the talented actor.

In addition to Yucatan, Team Downey is also developing a horror-comedy called Cloaked, a Pinocchio riff, Perry Mason, and Sherlock Holmes 3, so Downey Jr. will remain mighty busy in the near future.  With Yucatan setting Rossio to pen the script, it’s possible that project could surface as the next Team Downey film to make it to the screen.