After a yearlong search that took film producers around the globe, Paramount recently announced it has finally found its Bob Marley. Kingsley Ben-Adir, the British actor who portrayed Malcolm X in "One Night in Miami," has been cast in the untitled biopic on the reggae star's life.
Given some of the other names attached to the project —Reinaldo Marcus Green, the director of "King Richard," the screenwriter Zach Baylin and the Marley family — I have no doubt about the quality of the film.
My question is which version of Bob Marley will audiences see: the revolutionary who struggled to sell records or the version that received a posthumous makeover that helped turn his greatest hits compilation into the second-longest charting album of all time. That's right, at 717 weeks "Legend: The Best of Bob Marley and the Wailers" trails only Pink Floyd's "The Dark Side of the Moon" in terms of chart longevity.
