Sinister’s Ethan Hawke, Scott Derrickson Reunite for New Horror-Thriller

Actor Ethan Hawke and director Scott Derrickson will reunite for a new movie according to The Hollywood Reporter. Having previously collaborated on 2012 Blumhouse horror movie Sinister, the pair are now set to work on The Black Phone which is set up at the same studio and will be released by Universal. Derrickson and his frequent co-writer Robert Cargill have penned the script for the film which is based on one of Joe Hill short stories from the 20th Century Ghosts collection. Production on the film will kick off in North Carolina in February, no release date has been set yet for the movie.

The plot of The Black Phone, as described by the trade is that it follows “a kidnapped kid who finds himself in a soundproof basement surrounded by the remains of other victims. When night falls, the antique — and disconnected — telephone in the room begins to ring with the calls from the dead.” Hawke will play the kidnapper apparently with For All Mankind’s Mason Thames playing the young boy. Jeremy Davis is set to play the boy’s father with Madeleine McGraw taking on the role of his sister.

This marks the first time that Hawke and Derrickson have worked together since the 2012 feature but the actor previously theorized that they almost worked together on the Marvel Studios movie Doctor Strange.

“I would love to work with Scott [Derrickson] and I have a sneaky suspicion that Scott wanted me for that too,” Hawke said on the Happy Sad Confused podcast back in 2015, but noted that he was perhaps not the biggest name to make it work. “If people are gonna put up with somebody like me, they wanna make sure you’re gonna put asses in seats, and there’s a lot of actors that are gonna put more asses in seats than me…There’s a tremendous amount of salesmanship that’s now really important to a studio like that. It’s a tremendous amount of time in your life where you’re working, and you’re not acting.”

Coincidentally now Hawke has been enlisted for a project with Marvel Studios, having been tapped to play the villain in their planned Moon Knight series on Disney+, while Derrickson previously exited the sequel to Doctor Strange. Spider-Man and The Evil Dead filmmaker Sam Raimi was hired to fill in on the movie following his departure.

For those worried that The Black Phone might get in the way of Hawke’s Marvel schedule, with a February start date it’s likely that production will wrap on the movie before Moon Knight begins shooting in March.