Three con­cept images and a “logo treat­ment” were released to the pub­lic, the last of which looks might­ily impressive.

With­out a fiz­zle or a PoP for nigh on three years the project seemed almost dead. Or maybe it was just because of Jerry Bruckheimer’s busi­ness in a mul­ti­tude of suc­cess­ful pro­duc­tions, oh, take for instance the Pirates of the Caribbean tril­ogy (every­thing is a trilogy!).

But alas! In April 2007 we have some announce­ments. A direc­tor has been assigned — the man behind The Rock and Bad Boys, but also the Pearl Har­bor atroc­ity (just the film) — Michael Bay is set to direct; we can all judge for our­selves his present form when The Trans­form­ers movie lands this sum­mer. As a result, shoot­ing for this movie will be unlikely to com­mence until the Fall.

Shack­news also reports that Jef­frey Nach­manoff, screen­writer for  “The Day After Tomor­row”, is devel­op­ing “revi­sions” of Mechner’s script. Who knows where this could leave us — though the sto­ry­line is meant to be along the lines of “retain­ing the ele­ments of the evil vizier seek­ing to con­trol the sands of time, and the pres­ence of the princess-turned-sidekick Farah”.

With this news comes a pro­jected Sum­mer 2009 release date. 

As far back as 2004, Vari­ety reported that Jerry Bruck­heimer, world famous pro­ducer behind films such as Black Hawk Down and Pirates of the Caribbean, was nego­ti­at­ing a “seven fig­ure” deal to obtain the movie rights to Ubisoft’s Prince of Per­sia fran­chise — whilst the film itself would fall to Dis­ney to develop.

It was also reported that Jor­dan Mech­ner, behind the sto­ry­lines in the video games, would be work­ing on the scripts first drafts, with John August (Big Fish, Go) super­vis­ing and exec­u­tive pro­duc­ing. Mike Sten­son and Chad Oman are also exec­u­tive producers.

Those look­ing for a faith­ful adap­ta­tion of the fran­chise might be a lit­tle dis­ap­pointed, Mechner’s first quote states, “Rather than do a straight beat-for-beat adap­ta­tion of the new videogame, we’re tak­ing some cool ele­ments from the game and using them to craft a new story — much as ‘Pirates’ did with the theme park ride.”

Cool ele­ments sounds omi­nous. The arti­cle goes on to liken the Prince with Indi­ana Jones and the par­al­lels are clear; dun­geons, sand, the 9th cen­tury (oh wait). What was one of the last Disney/Bruckheimer part­ner­ships? The bril­liant (this is sar­casm) King Arthur.