A double Academy Award winner is going back to the future. Denzel Washington will star in the post-apocalyptic drama Book of Eli, to be directed by Albert and Allen Hughes, according to Variety. He will play "a lone hero in a not-too-distant apocalyptic future who must fight across America to bring society the knowledge that could be the key to its redemption." Sounds like the best of all possible worlds, doesn't it? Denzel as an intellectual action hero of the future.

Denzel has been resolutely dealing with modern-day problems for the last decade, so maybe he felt like a change of pace. As far as I can tell, the only time that Denzel's tipped his toe into future waters was back in 1995 with Brett Leonard's Virtuosity. In that movie, set just four years into the future, he faced off against a virtual reality Russell Crowe. How far into the future will Book of Eli be set? Who gets the blame for the apocalypse? Will this be a tale of weary, wary survivors or vengeful warriors? And what's in that book, anyway?

Amazingly, this will be the first feature from The Hughes Brothers since 2001's graphic novel adapatation From Hell. They'll be working from a script originally written by Gary Whitta (the two new Akira films) and re-written by Anthony Peckham (Clint Eastwood's upcoming The Human Factor and Sherlock Holmes for Warner Bros). Joel Silver is on board as one of the producers. Filming begins in January.