‘The Last Days of American Crime’ Film Details Reportedly Revealed

The Last Days of American Crime, Netflix’s upcoming movie based on the Rick Remender/Greg Tocchini comic book series, is set to film from October to December in South Africa, THR reports.

Locations will reportedly include Cape Town and Johannesburg, and filming will take place between October 24 and December 19, with an eye toward a late 2019/early 2020 release.

The film will come on the heels of SYFY’s Deadly Class, which is currently in production in Vancouver. That project, also based on a comic by Rick Remender (this time with artist Wes Craig), will debut in early 2019.

The Last Days of American Crime is set in a near future where the U.S. government, fighting terrorism and crime, plans to begin broadcasting a signal that makes it impossible for anyone to knowingly commit an unlawful act.

Edgar Ramirez will star as Graham Bricke, a career criminal who has never been able to make it big but gets caught up in a scheme with a femme fatale and her deadly boyfriend to commit the heist of the century. They have to beat other criminals, themselves and the clock before the signal turns on.

“I think that the joy of doing an original graphic novel, which is something that I got to sort of do with Last Days of American Crime with Greg Tocchini, was to write it without being concerned about issue breaks,” Remender once told ComicBook.com. “The issue breaks can help you because you have to reach a climactic cliffhanger moment every 20-22 pages, but at the same time you can also get into a place where you’re not at that moment, and you’re only at page 20. You’re going to have to rework your entire script and shift things around to get yourself to that cliffhanger moment. With a comic book, you can’t just end on any page. You can’t just say ‘Page 20: They finish their cereal and put it in the sink! Ta da!’ But with a graphic novel, you don’t have to do that. With a graphic novel, it’s just the equivalent of writing five or six issues of comic book, but as one long story. My time writing and studying screenplays and the three act structure is a discipline that I’m able to dig into here. The script is the same size as a screenplay. I’m basically writing it like a screenplay, which is a wonderful exercise.”

The film will team cinematographer Daniel Aranyo with director Olivier Megaton, best known for his works on Transporter and Taken sequels.