This actually isn't extremely recent news, but it's still amusing enough to post about. Apparently there's two Pablo Escobar movies getting made (both are suffering from the writers' strike), and of course they've both enjoyed some additional awareness due to the fictional Medellin movie from HBO's Entourage. It's odd that there's two separate projects going on related to the story, and also the fact that both movies have supposedly been talked about for some time which makes me wonder if the Entourage reference was intentional or not. Apparently there's been some tension between the two movies for obvious reasons, pitting Oliver Stone-produced "Escobar" against Joe Carnahan-penned "Killing Pablo":

Stone, who has covered the drug-smuggling terrain as a screenwriter on "Midnight Express" and "Scarface," also knows a thing or two about winning a biopic race: His movie on Alexander the Great got into production first, halting a rival film on the Macedonian conqueror that Baz Luhrmann was to direct and Leonardo DiCaprio was to topline.

Carnahan has worked for five years on "Killing Pablo." Awareness of the subject was recently heightened by "Medellin," a fictional film that was part of an ongoing storyline in the HBO series "Entourage."

While Carnahan and Yari downplayed a rival's emergence in announcing that their Escobar film was on firm footing, the "Escobar" producers said theirs is an honest depiction of Escobar's rise to become one of the world's richest men by leading the Medellin drug cartel and inflicting terror upon Colombia. "Joe Carnahan's notion of us poaching his territory and rushing for a pre-strike start is false. We've been working with Robert and a half-dozen consultants for a year and a half to tell an accurate story," said Berfield, the former "Malcolm in the Middle" star who's also mobilizing a feature about Grateful Dead frontman Jerry Garcia.

Berfield said that while Escobar's brother is a consultant with a first-hand perspective on how his brother built a drug empire, the sibling doesn't have script approval. "My brother will be portrayed as a ruthless head of the Medellin cartel," Escobar Gaviria said in a statement. "This is just 10% of the story. The other 90% is the story others trying to portray him simply don't have."

Stone said: "This is a great project about a fascinating man who took on the system. I think I have to thank 'Scarface,' and maybe even Ari Gold."

HBO's trailer for the fake Medellin film can be found here.