Mel Gibson and Sean Penn Starring in a Movie About The Creation of The Dictionary

Well, there's a headline I never thought I'd write.

The Hollywood Reporter says Mel Gibson is set to star in The Professor and The Madman, a film about — and this is not a joke — the creation of the Oxford English Dictionary. Sean Penn is in negotiations to play a lead role opposite Gibson, while Apocalypto writer Farhad Safinia wrote the screenplay and will direct the movie, which "delves into madness, genius and two obsessive men who changed the course of literary history."

Gibson will play Professor James Murray, who in 1857 set about compiling the OED, one of the most ambitious projects ever undertaken. Penn will play Dr. W. C. Minor, who submitted more than 10,000 entries but was also an inmate at an asylum for the criminally insane.

This has been a passion project of Gibson's for nearly twenty years. He acquired the rights to Simon Winchester's bestselling book of the same name back in 1998, and wanted to direct it himself before eventually passing those duties on to Safinia.

Years after his drunken meltdown, Gibson is poised for a comeback starring in the action movie Blood Father and directing a war movie called Hacksaw Ridge. This will be the first time he's worked with Penn, but both of them seem to have already passed their peak years as movie stars, so it'll be interesting to see if they can put butts in seats for a story that, at least on the surface, sounds like it could easily be pretty damn boring.