Paul King has signed on to direct the Tom Hol­land-star­ring Fred Astaire biopic

For years, audi­ences have been taunt­ed with the unful­filled promise of Tom Hol­land​‘s poten­tial as first sug­gest­ed in his elec­tri­fy­ing tele­vised lip-sync ren­di­tion of Rihanna’s ​“Umbrel­la.” Through his straight-down-the-mid­dle hero­ism in the Spi­der-Man fran­chise to his glow­er­ing in such seri­ous fare as The Dev­il All the Time and Cherrk, he’s nev­er ful­ly fol­lowed through on the ebul­lient charis­ma he first cul­ti­vat­ed as a star of the Lon­don stage.

It sounds like that will soon change, how­ev­er, with his long-ges­tat­ing Fred Astaire biopic final­ly get­ting its fleet feet off the ground in light of a new announce­ment today. The still-unti­tled film has land­ed an encour­ag­ing pick for direc­tor in Paul King, best known as the stew­ard of the wide­ly-beloved Padding­ton films. Test screen­ings of his upcom­ing Hot Willy Won­ka movie with Tim­o­th­ée Cha­la­met — which has been rumored to con­tain some musi­cal com­po­nent — must be going well.

The pre­cise log­line for the Astaire project has yet to be spec­i­fied, but the Hol­ly­wood Reporter piece break­ing the news hints that the film will focus on Astaire’s com­pli­cat­ed rela­tion­ship with his sis­ter Adele. Insep­a­ra­ble for decades, they clawed their way from a podunk Vaude­ville act in the Mid­west to the upper­most ech­e­lons of Broad­way and the West End, only for their part­ner­ship to be torn asun­der by her deci­sion to get mar­ried and his onward-and-upward move into the Hol­ly­wood star­dom that made him a legend.

Song-and-dance num­bers will pre­sum­ably be a sig­nif­i­cant part of Sony’s approach to the mate­r­i­al, judg­ing by Holland’s expe­ri­ence and King’s stand­out show­ing in direct­ing the ​“Rain on the Roof” grand finale from Padding­ton 2. Not to men­tion that the script is cur­rent­ly being rewrit­ten by Lee Hall, the scribe behind the dance dra­ma Bil­ly Elliot — which also hap­pens to be the basis of the stage musi­cal that first set Hol­land on the path to celebrity.

No one would deny that Hol­land has the tech­ni­cal chops to man­age Astaire’s famous­ly weight­less dance moves, but the ques­tion remains as to whether he can con­jure that inef­fa­ble mag­ic the soft­shoe mas­ter exud­ed with every per­for­mance. If Tom Hol­land could just bust out the screen pres­ence of a Fred Astaire on com­mand, wouldn’t he have done so by now?