Peter and Bobby Farrelly have been trying to bring their movie version of The Three Stooges to us for a long time now, and it looked as though things were going well when we discovered that they had Benicio Del Toro, Sean Penn, and Jim Carrey set to play Moe, Larry, and Curly. The project took a turn for the worst when it was announced that Penn was going to drop all of his film projects to concentrate on his family problems, which unfortunately ended with the splitting up of he and his wife Robin Wright Penn. Now comes word via The Boston Herald that Penn is back and ready to reacquire the role of Larry now that some form of resolution has been reached in his personal life.

This is obviously great news for the Farrelly brothers, who feared that his initial departure could spell the end for the struggling project, though there were rumors of the fantastic Paul Giamatti taking over for Penn.

Even with this little ray of light, Three Stooges is still a long way off; after Penn left, the Farrelly’s moved on to a project called Hall Pass, which stars Owen Wilson as a man whose wife gives him a one-week free pass to pursue as many women as possible in a last-ditch effort to enhance their own sex life. That film begins shooting next month.

After Hall Pass we can surely expect Three Stooges to get moving forward again, but there is still one big issue to remedy. After Penn first left the project, we also heard rumors that Carrey was also stepping away from the movie, even though he put on a lot of weight to play Curly. If this is the truth, they should just use the actor that they were looking at for Larry in Giamatti and run with it.