Cameron Crowe considering Scarlett Johansson and three other ladies for We Bought a Zoo

Cameron Crowe’s latest project is beginning to pick up some steam. Deadline is reporting that the filmmaker has got his eye on a group of actresses, which include Scarlett Johansson, Amy Adams, Rachel McAdams, and Mary Elizabeth Winstead, to take up the pivotal female lead in the drama WE BOUGHT A ZOO.

The film is an adaptation of We Bought a Zoo: The Amazing True Story of a Young Family, a Broken Down Zoo, and the 200 Wild Animals that Changed Their Lives Forever, a memoir written by former newspaper columnist Benjamin Mee. Here’s more from a report earlier this year:

“Back in 2006, Mee was a do-it-yourself columnist for the U.K.’s Guardian newspaper. The writer took it to a whole new level when he decided to move into a rundown twelve-bedroom mansion in the English countryside with his wife, two children, brother, and 76-year-old mother. On top of that, the mansion included a 30 acre wildlife park that was home to 200 wild animals. Their success was bittersweet when Mee’s wife, Katherine, learned that she had terminal cancer.”

Apparently, Johansson is the top contender for the part of ‘Katherine’, though I’d personally prefer to see McAdams or Adams in the role as I feel they exude a much more endearing sort of fragility that would play well to Crowe’s style (something I think is important for a person that’s going to portray a terminal cancer victim).

WE BOUGHT A ZOO, starring Matt Damon as Benjamin Mee and Thomas Hayden Church as older brother Duncan, is currently scheduled for a December 23, 2011 release.