Despite that both Hollywood’s writers and actors are currently on strike, people apparently are still hoping to sell film projects as part of the Toronto International Film Festival.
As new films are shown on festival screens, others still in preproduction are “packaged” with talent to become part of the TIFF marketplace. In this case, “packaged” means there is a script in place and stars or producers tentatively attached — not that Amazon has finished improperly boxing your stuff.
Per Deadline, the first big project to be revealed for the TIFF market is a package by WME Independent. The film is titled The Beast, and Marvel alumnus Samuel L. Jackson is in talks to star alongside The Suicide Squad lead Joel Kinnaman.
Apparently, the project was packed before the strikes began this summer, and it’s all set to go before cameras with a fancy interim agreement from SAG-AFTRA (meaning they can make the movie despite the actors union flipping off an increasingly sweaty Bob Iger).
Although the film sounds like a movie where Idris Elba is attacked by a digital lion, the title actually references a presidential limousine nicknamed “The Beast” by the Secret Service.
The vehicle is reinforced with armor to protect it from bullets and even bombs. Deadline says the car is also stocked with grenades and shotguns. That sounds like one of those “presidential escape pod” flights of fancy akin to Air Force One, but clearly we don’t guard the president and can only speculate.
Jackson is set to play the U.S. president, who must defend himself from within The Beast after a coup against the country is launched by a mysterious group—not the Proud Boys this time; they are presumably “standing by.”
Kinneman would portray a Secret Service agent who is injured in the coup and then aided by the president himself, who will surely volley a few one-liners about how the guys with earpieces should be saving him and not the other way around.
The WME wants everyone to know that Jackson will also learn to harness “the monster inside himself,” so it’s one of those clever double-meaning titles, like Freddy Got Fingered.
James Madigan is set to direct, coming off second-unit work for The Meg and Transformers: Rise of the Beasts. And before you say, “Eh, this sounds like a streaming movie,” let us assure you that at this point Gerard Butler has nothing to do with the film.
TIFF starts tomorrow. Let’s hope this movie gets a buyer so that viewers can one day watch Jackson spouting four-letter words while changing a Kevlar tire on the side of the road.
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