Steven Spielberg’s next movie will tell the story of a boy and his horse. Variety reports this week that after much deliberation, he has finally decided that his next directorial effort will be War Horse, based on the children’s book by Michael Morpurgo which was also turned into a play. Lee Hall (Billy Elliott) and Richard Curtis (Love Actually) will pen the script about a young boy whose horse is sold to the cavalry during World War I, and the boy’s quest to re-unite with him.

It’s interesting that an announcement about a Spielberg WWI film should come just as his WWII film Saving Private Ryan is released on Blu-ray, and his Band of Brothers follow-up The Pacific is airing on HBO. Of course, this sounds a little more along the lines of Empire of the Sun than any of those projects. Personally I was kind of hoping Spielberg would take on Robopocalypse, but hey, what can you do? A tentative release date for War Horse has been set for August 10th, 2011, which is actually four months earlier than Spielberg’s current project, The Adventures of Tin-Tin: The Secret of the Unicorn.

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