According to a blog post by Queen guitarist Brian May, the Freddie Mercury biopic starring Sacha Baron Cohen as the late, great singer has fallen behind schedule and will now be due out in 2014. Initial news about the unlikely team-up came over three years ago with the announcement that Peter Morgan (Frost/Nixon, The Last King of Scotland) had been hired to write. It’s still unknown whether or not Baron Cohen will sing in Mercury’s stead, but the band appears to have been involved every step of the way. May’s update reveals that filming will begin early next year. He also teases some “other plans” for Queen he’d discussed in a meeting with drummer Roger Taylor and manager Jim Beach. Here’s the full text:

“Our main agenda was the Freddie film … which, I’m happy to tell you, is on course. Much of our discussion was about contractual things … it’s pretty complex …. and determining who is responsible for what. The pieces are all falling into place, though we are now on a slightly later schedule – filming is now scheduled to start in the Spring, with Sacha Baron Cohen playing Freddie. The film should be ready for release early in 2014. We did make some other plans, but they will have to stay under wraps for now. Being in Queen is – bizarrely – as full of surprising twists and turns as ever – 40 years since we first got together, and 20 years after losing Freddie. But of course Freddie is in so many ways very much alive. He must be wryly smiling somewhere!!!”

This band has lost nothing in flair. Check out an “optical illusion” of Mercury at the Olympics: