Ben Stiller and Brett Ratner’s heist movie is happening

Brett Ratner spent years trying to put together his “black OCEAN’S ELEVEN”, but it apparently took the blackness of Ben Stiller to really get things moving.

TOWER HEIST, the heist movie set in a tower, is finally becoming a reality.

The endlessly rewritten project was initially meant to feature people like Eddie Murphy, Chris Rock and Chris Tucker, but this whitewashed version will instead feature Stiller as “the overworked manager of a luxury building who, along with other staff, lost their pensions to a Bernie Madoff-like Wall Street crook. It so happens that the fraudster is being held under house arrest in the luxury penthouse apartment upstairs, and the manager and four cohorts figure a heist will make them whole,” per Deadline.

“It has become the quintessential New York heist movie, where a bunch of blue collar employees in a tower building pull off the ultimate heist,” says Ratner, who hasn’t hustled audiences out of their cash since RUSH HOUR 3. “The major difference from the OCEAN’S film is those guys were expert thieves. These are real guys whose talent is they know the inner workings of the building and the people in it.“

No word yet on who those other guys will be, but the Universal movie is being scheduled to shoot in November with manga-haired producer Brian Grazer overseeing.