Last year, a bidding war was going down between Netflix and Amazon for a lucrative package deal. The two streaming giants were in a fight to acquire the film rights to the novella by Don Winslow called Crime 101. The package deal had included two attached stars — Chris Hemsworth and Pedro Pascal. Although, Pascal has now reportedly been replaced by Mark Ruffalo. It also has a director set to helm the project with Bart Layton, whose credits include the documentary The Imposter from 2012 and American Animals from 2018. Amazon had come out as the victor and according to Deadline, Saltburn and Masters of the Air star Barry Keoghan will now join the heist film.
Crime 101 is said to be a crime drama in the vein of Michael Mann’s Heat. The plot of the film has yet to be released; however, Deadline’s summary of the novel reads that “the original short story by Winslow has shades of Heat as it follows high-level jewel thefts that are taking place up and down the Pacific Coast, which police have linked to Colombian cartels. Detective Lou Lubesnick has other ideas, and he zeroes in on one perp, a thief looking for a final score.” Additionally, it has been reported that HarperCollins had published the heist story as part of the Don Winslow collection, Broken, in 2020.
Bart Layton will not only be directing the crime film, but he will also be credited as the screenwriter. The producers on Crime 101 will include Story Factory’s Shane Salerno, Working Title’s Eric Fellner and Tim Bevan, RAW’s Layton and Dimitri Doganis and Derrin Schlesinger. RAW’s Joely Fether will also be attached to executive produce.
Meanwhile, Hemsworth is coming off a role that many are deeming to be one of his best performances as Dementus, the biker messiah cult leader from George Miller’s recent film Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga. He is also in talks to star in the follow-up to Transformers: Rise of the Beasts, which will crossover with the G.I. Joe franchise. But Hemsworth is also playing a young Optimus Prime in Transformers One. In that film, the animated movie tells the “long-awaited origin story of how the most iconic characters in the Transformers universe, Orion Pax and D-16, went from brothers-in-arms to become sworn enemies, Optimus Prime and Megatron.” Chris Hemsworth and Brian Tyree Henry star as Orion Pax/Optimus Prime and D-16/Megatron, respectively. The cast also includes Scarlett Johansson as Elita, Keegan-Michael Key as Bumblebee, Jon Hamm as Sentinel Prime, and Laurence Fishburne as Alpha Trion. Josh Cooley directs from a script by Andrew Barrer, Steve Desmond, and Gabriel Ferrari. The film will hit theaters on September 20th.
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