Harry over at Ain’t It Cool News has a scoop that puts Jason Patric as the most recent addition to the cast of Sylvain White’s The Losers.

Word is that an announcement could come as early as Tuesday of next week that Patric will be playing Max, the enigmatic CIA handler of The Losers squad that sells them out and tries to have them killed. Patric joins Jeffrey Dean Morgan as Clay, Idris Elba as Roque, Zoe Saldana as Aisha, and Columbus Short as Pooch in the film. Jeremy Renner is rumored to play Cougar (great casting, in my opinion) and Chris Evans is rumored to play Jensen (kind of an odd choice as Jensen’s the geekier comic relief of the group, but Evans could definitely pull it off).

Fans of the comic will know Max as the big bad mastermind behind all the evil plotting, but he doesn’t actually physically appear until much later in the story. If they intend to franchise the series, it’ll be interesting to see how they handle the inevitable showdown in the first film (cause you can’t kill off your main bad guy in the first movie, can you?). Patric is a big talent, so I hope they can find something for him to do without giving away too much of the character’s presence early on. After all, half the fun of the series was trying to figure out who the hell this Max guy was.

Tags: Jason Patric, Sylvain White, The Losers