After a major bidding war, Zach Cregger’s Barbarian follow-up Weapons landed at New Line and now we have a few major updates. With a shoot set to kick off this July, Production Weekly reports Rooney Mara will star in the project and they’ve revealed a logline: “A multi and inter-related story horror epic centered around witchcraft and missing children.” The film was previously described as being tonally in the vein of Paul Thomas Anderson’s 1999 epic Magnolia, so expect many more cast members to join the ensemble.
After Netflix announced August Wilson’s Broadway play The Piano Lesson is getting the big-screen treatment a few years back, we’ve now gleaned more about the players involved. Production Weekly reports that Malcolm Washington, Denzel Washington’s son, will direct the adaptation, while John David Washington and Samuel L. Jackson will reprise their roles. Here’s the official synopsis:
At the heart of the story stands the ornately carved upright piano which, as the Charles family’s prized, hard-won possession, has been gathering dust in the parlor of Berniece Charles’s Pittsburgh home. When Boy Willie, Berniece’s exuberant brother, bursts into her life with his dream of buying the same Mississippi land that his family had worked as slaves, he plans to sell their antique piano for the hard cash he needs to stake his future. But Berniece refuses to sell, clinging to the piano as a reminder of the history that is their family legacy. This dilemma is the real “piano lesson,” reminding us that blacks are often deprived both of the symbols of their past and of opportunity in the present.
Emily the Criminal director John Patton Ford has found his next film with Huntington, Deadline reports. Drawing loosely from the classic Kind Hearts and Coronets, the film tells “the story of a super-rich upstate New York family and its young outcast, who hatches a murderous plot to work his way back into the family, in order to regain his birth right and inherit their fortune.” Described as “a dark, funny and highly entertaining satirical thriller,” Ford is currently looking for his male lead ahead of production kicking off later this year.
Beast and Encounter director Michael Pearce has set his next film with Echo Valley, scripted and produced by Mare of Easttown creator Brad Ingelsby. Variety reports Julianne Moore and Sydney Sweeney will star in the Apple Studios project, which follows Kate Garrett (Moore), “a woman reeling from a personal tragedy who spends her days boarding and training horses on the secluded and picturesque Echo Valley Farm. Late one night, her wayward daughter Claire (Sweeney) arrives at her doorstep, frightened, trembling and covered in someone else’s blood. From that simple premise, Echo Valley becomes a heart-pounding thriller about just how far a mother will go to save her child.”
Also over at Apple, Doug Liman is assembling his cast for The Instigators. Deadline reports Hong Chau and Paul Walter Hauser are joining Matt Damon and Casey Affleck in the drama, which follows two thieves who go on the run with the help of one of their therapists after a robbery goes awry.
Lastly, it looks like a new film from Joel Potrykus (Relaxer, Buzzard) is in production. Cinematographer Adam J. Minnick shared a snap from the set of the film, titled Unemployees, via Sean Malin: