Just days away from the official trailer Fast And Furious Presents: Hobbs And Shaw, director David Leitch is marking a new foray into graphic novel territory with Undying Love, as reported by Mike Fleming Jr. at Deadline on Wednesday.
Author and screenwriter Ellen Shanman has been busy working her fingers with projects Paramount, Imagine and Black Label Media among a raft of other companies. Her workload now extends to efforts currently in the hands of Studio 8 for an adaptation of Ken Liu’s 2017 publication, The Hidden Girl, which the firm landed in 2016.
The female-centric sci-fi thriller tells of an ancient Chinese myth about a team of women assassins who can navigate between dimensions. As Anita Busch’s exclusive on Tuesday details, The Hidden Girl is one of over 100 short stories, many of which have decorated Liu with multiple awards, including 2012 publications “The Paper Menagerie” and “Mono no Aware”, and the multi-award winnint Spring 2015 print, “The Grace of Kings”.
There’s no director or cast attached while The Hidden Girl remains as one of many projects the Studio isn’t sitting still on, including Hypnotic, Planet Kill, crowdfunded comic Black, the Brad Inglesby-penned MMA Thai prison thriller Champion, Chad Stahelski’s Sandman Slim and Graham Moore’s Naked Is The Best Disguise which goes before cameras this year. Rishi Rajani, Jessica Switch and Chris Goldberg will oversee for Studio 8.
Shanman’s other works apart from authoring for Random House/Bantam Dell, include adapting Ally Carter’s bestselling spy-girl book series Gallagher Girls for Paramount, and Satou Keichii’s Tiger & Bunny for Imagine and Anew, as well as non-fiction, New York Times bestseller, Nothing Daunted for Black Label Media, and YA superhero novel The Brokenhearted for New Line and Alloy.
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More martial arts movie news this week revealed word from Deadline about upcoming action thriller, Champion. The film hails from Studio 8 whose latest acquisition as of Friday comes in the wake of current movement Graham Moore’s sci-fi pic, Naked Is The Best Disguise, as well as Hypnotic and Steve Soderburgh’s Planet Kill.
John Graham and Rishi Rajani are overseeing progress for Studio 8 on Champion which centers on two American brothers who are forced to mitigate their freedom in a deadly underground Thai boxing tornament after being wrongfully imprisoned in Thailand. Run All Night and Out Of The Furnace scribe Brad Inglesby penned the script from The Fast And The Furious writer Gary Scott Thompson’s original spec.
Storyscape Entertainment’s Bob Cooper and Richard Saperstein are producing with Pioneer Picture’s Robert Kravis and Karl Hermann with Tyler Mitchell and Marc Fiorentino executive producing.
Marc Fiorentino brought the project to John Graham who will oversee with Rishi Rajani for Studio 8.
Graham Moore, who wrote Morten Tyldum’s Alan Turning drama, The Imitation Game, is preparing for his own directorial debut at Studio 8 for futuristic female-led thriller, Naked Is The Best Disguise. The multi-award-winning screenwriter developed the script with Scoop Wasserstein who is producing via his Scoop Productions banner.
As Borys Kit details the plot at The Hollywood Reporter; the movie takes place over the course of one night, and is set in a near future in which new technology allows one person’s memories to be extracted and inserted into someone else. It centers on an illegal memory dealer who is accused of murdering a man who she does not believe she even knows.
Naked Is The Best Disguise marks another stirring addition to Studio 8 which kicks off its slate later this year with Yann Demange’s White Boy Rick and Albert Hughes’s Alpha, on top of the recently-announced development of Robert Rodriguez’s sci-fi thriller, Hypnotic. Casting for Moore’s debut is set to begin immediately for the film with the goal of a 2018 start date.
Time will tell if this one picks up steam but word from Deadline has it that Chad Stahelski is planning his way into another film franchise. For this, we turn to New York Times best-selling author Richard Kadrey’s longstanding Sandman Slim novels comprised of nine installments as of 2009 with a tenth in tow for 2018.
Via HarperVoyager:
Supernatural fantasy has a new antihero.
Life sucks and then you die. Or, if you’re James Stark, you spend eleven years in Hell as a hitman before finally escaping, only to land back in the hell-on-earth that is Los Angeles.
Now Stark’s back, and ready for revenge. And absolution, and maybe even love. But when his first stop saddles him with an abusive talking head, Stark discovers that the road to absolution and revenge is much longer than you’d expect, and both Heaven and Hell have their own ideas for his future.
Resurrection sucks. Saving the world is worse.
What Happened To Monday scribe is adapting the novels following a draft by Kel Symons penned back in 2016 when after Studio 8 acquired the rights. LBI Entertainment’s Patrick Walmsley and Julie Yorn are producing with John Lesher with Chris Goldberg overseeing production for Studio 8 next to Rishi Rajani.
The film adds to the burgeoning director’s credits following an extensive career in stunts and second unit direction. Stahelski’s next turn at the helm will be John Wick: Chapter Three for its May 17, 2019 release from Lionsgate.
The creators, Kwanza Osajyefo – a former Marvel and DC digital editor, and Tim Smith 3, tripled their funding goals upon launching the Kickstarter to fund the comic last February. They are attached as co-producers with Matteo Pizzolo producing the film.
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