'Yucatan': Steve McQueen's Treasure-Hunt Movie Revived At Netflix

(L-R) Robert Downey Jr., Steve McQueen and Gareth Dunnet-Alcocer Courtesy/Getty Images/Universal

EXCLUSIVE: A longtime passion project imagined by the late Steve McQueen has been revived.

Two decades after the iconic actor’s son Chad McQueen and family friend/Warner Bros exec Lance Sloan began development on the film Yucatan, Gareth Dunnet-Alcocer (Blue Beetle, Miss Bala) has been set as the screenwriter of the project that is now in early development at Netflix, we understand. Robert Downey Jr. and Susan Downey remain attached as producers under their Team Downey banner.

Both Netflix and Team Downey declined to comment.

McQueen’s vision involved a story about a renegade salvage expert’s search for Mayan treasure in the Yucatan Peninsula with him taking the lead. Details regarding where Dunnet-Alcocer will take the story are under wraps. Mexican writer Dunnet-Alcocer is working fresh with McQueen’s script, which was discovered years after his 1980 death as part of a collection of notebooks he left behind in a pair of trunks.

Dunnet-Alcocer is the fourth writer attached following Paul Scheuring, Anthony Peckham and Terry Rossio, who had been involved at different stages of development.

Deadline understands it’s too early to announce casting, however, the freshly minted Oscar-winner could potentially star. The connection to Netflix comes by way of Dan Lin, the streamer’s new film chief who was previously attached as a producer in a 2014 report.

The stars seem more aligned this time around. Downey is coming off his first Oscar win for his portrayal of Rear Admiral Lewis Strauss in Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer. He’s also set to make his Broadway debut in Ayad Akhtar’s McNeal, a drama he will star in and produce set to debut this fall.

It’s also the right time for Lin, as well, who in February was named Netflix’s film chief following Scott Stuber’s exit. As a producer, Lin scored major wins with movies that hint at how big Yucatan could be including most recently Avatar: The Last Airbender as well as The Lego Movie franchise, It and its sequel, and the two Downey-led Sherlock Holmes films.

Dunnet-Alcocer is a rising star who joins the fold following his work with Warner Bros on Blue Beetle, starring Xolo Maridueña as the DC superhero. He had also completed work on the screenplay for El Muerto, based on the Marvel superhero of the same name, from Sony Pictures; Benito “Bad Bunny” Martínez Ocasio had been attached to star in that but exited the project due to scheduling issues, with the project pulled from Sony’s release schedule and in a holding pattern.

Of late, Dunnet-Alcocer has been busy at work on the secret Prime Video spinoff series The Boys: Mexico, from executive producers Diego Luna and Gael Garcia Bernal under their La Corriente del Golfo banner. The Mexico-set offshoot comes from the main creative auspices behind the other series in The Boys franchise including the mothership’s developer Eric Kripke and his Kripke Enterprises, Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg’s Point Grey Pictures, Neal H. Moritz’s Original Film, Sony Pictures Television and Amazon MGM Studios.