Scott Mitchell Rosenberg's Cowboys & Aliens, one of those long gestating comic book-based projects that bounced around the studios well before actual publication, looks like it has finally found a Hollywood home as Dreamworks and Universal have announced the acquisition of the rights to the property and have assigned Mark Fergus and Hawk Ostby (Iron Man, Children of Men) to write the screenplay.  Imagine Entertainment partners Brian Grazer and Ron Howard will produce along with Scott Rosenberg, Alex Kurtzman, and Roberto Orci (Kurtzman & Orci worked on the screenplay for the Transformers and wrote a draft for the new Star Trek film).

Three years ago Cowboys & Aliens was at Sony having previously languished at Dreamworks (see 'Writers Announced for Cowboys & Aliens'), and writers Joshua Oppenheimer and Thomas Donnelly were working on the screenplay. The Cowboys & Aliens graphic novel came out last year and now the project has come back to Dreamworks, where it may have better luck the second time around.