Sony and MGM Partners up on the ‘Magnificent Seven’ Starring Denzel Washington, Ethan Hawke, Chris Pratt and Haley Bennett

Sony Pictures and MGM will jointly finance the The Magnificent Seven remake project, with the cost of production evenly shared between the two according to Variety. It was moreover agreed that Sony will handle film distribution while MGM will oversee the production side of the project.

Confirmed now in the cast is Ethan Hawke, 44, who will be reunited with his Training Day co-star Denzel Washington, 60, and director Antoine Fuqua who will also be helming for the remake of the 1960 classic western The Magnificent Seven by John Sturges which then starred Yul Brynner, Eli Wallach, Steve McQueen, Charles Bronson, Robert Vaughn, James Coburn, Brad Dexter and Horst Buchholz.

Hawke, Washington and Fuqua first collaborated together in the making of 2001's commercially successful and critically acclaimed Training Day. In that film, Hawke received a nomination for the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor, while Washington won the Academy Award for Best Actor.

Hawke and Washington is joined in the reboot The Magnificent Seven movie by Chris Pratt, 35, and Haley Bennett, 27. Washington, Fuqua and Bennett previously also worked together in the making of last year's The Equalizer film, a big-screen adaptation of the 1985 TV series.

According to The Hollywood Reporter, it will be Bennett's character who will be hiring the disparate group of gunslingers to protect her town from the rampaging bandits. However, the new version of the film will reportedly be set in a mining town, taken over by an unscrupulous gold baron, rather than the Mexican village seen in the original which was being victimized by bandits.

The Magnificent Seven's script is currently being rewritten by John Lee Hancock based on an earlier draft penned by Nic Pizzolatto. Neither the production starting date nor the target release date to theaters has been announce yet.

The 1960 The Magnificent Seven film was followed through with three sequels: Return of the Seven in 1966, Guns of the Magnificent Seven in 1969, and The Magnificent Seven Ride in 1972. A comedy parody, Tres Amigos, was released in 1986. It also launched a TV series which ran from 1998 to 2000 on CBS.

The original film was itself an Old West-style adaptation of a 1954 Japanese language movie by Akira Kurosawa titled Seven Samurai.