Al Pacino To Play Joe Paterno in Penn St. Scandal Film

It was inevitable. We knew over time someone would make a movie showcasing the Penn St. scandal that took the nation by storm this year. We knew it would come, but when?

The time is now.

Deadline.com reports that Al Pacino will play the role of Joe Paterno in the upcoming film. They write:

EXCLUSIVE: ICM Partners next week will be taking a package for a movie about fallen legend Penn State football head coach Joe Paterno, with Al Pacino attached to play the man called Papa Joe by most student at Happy Valley. The package will be build around Joe Posnanski’s biography Paterno, which is now atop The New York Times Bestseller List in its second week. Pacino’s manager, Rick Nicita, will produce.

The narrative arc of the movie that will be shopped is obvious. A man becomes the winningest coach in college football history and builds a powerhouse football program that turns him into a campus deity. When his former defensive coordinator Jerry Sandusky is revealed to be a pedophile whom a graduate assistant witnessed raping a boy in the locker room showers and it comes out that Paterno was told and helped hide the scandal and never called the police, Paterno was summarily fired. He died shortly after — many feel of a broken heart — and the school had little choice but to raze a fabled statue of the head coach, just as the NCAA dropped the hammer with sanctions against the school that included removal of Paterno’s wins going back to the coverup. Sandusky was found guilty on 45 counts of sexual abuse against young boys and is expected to spend the rest of his life in prison.

There has been no mention of when the film will debut as of yet.

We will update on this as we find out more. There is sure to be mixed emotions of the film when it does hit the big screen.