Edgar Wright Teams With X-Men Writer for New Thriller The Chain

Despite living in lockdown like the rest of us, filmmaker Edgar Wright has remained busy for the past three months. The prolific writer/director has yet another new project that’s been announced with Universal Pictures setting him to direct a feature adaptation of the novel The Chain. Deadline reports that Wright has been tapped to step behind the camera for the thriller with Kingsman: The Secret Service and X-Men: First Class scribe Jane Goldman set to pen the script. The film is based on the 2019 bestselling novel by Adrian McKinty, which was previously in talks to be optioned by Paramount Pictures.

The official description of the novel reads: “It’s something parents do every morning: Rachel Klein drops her daughter at the bus stop and heads into her day. But a cell phone call from an unknown number changes everything: it’s a woman on the line, informing her that she has Kylie bound and gagged in her back seat, and the only way Rachel will see her again is to follow her instructions exactly: pay a ransom, and find another child to abduct. This is no ordinary kidnapping: the caller is a mother herself, whose son has been taken, and if Rachel doesn’t do as she’s told, the boy will die.”

“Rachel is now part of The Chain, an unending and ingenious scheme that turns victims into criminals — and is making someone else very rich in the process. The rules are simple, the moral challenges impossible; find the money fast, find your victim , and then commit a horrible act you’d have thought yourself incapable of just twenty-four hours ago. But what the masterminds behind The Chain know is that parents will do anything for their children. It turns out that kidnapping is only the beginning.”

Wright has already lined up another new project as well and will helm Set My Heart to Five, a new film bring produced by Working Title and Focus Features and based on the upcoming novel by Simon Stephenson. Furthermore his new production company called Complete Fiction has set a slate of new projects at Netflix with both TV and feature films in the works.

His next feature film e film Last Night in Soho was previously set to arrive in theaters on September 25, but has now been scheduled to be released on April 23, 2021. Wright is also hard at work on an untitled documentary about the band Sparks, he’s also developing a sequel to Baby Driver, his highest grossing film of all time.