Netflix’s next big feature has been set. Saturday morning, news surfaced (via Deadline) the streamer has tapped Chris Hemsworth (Thor), Jurnee Smollett (Birds of Prey), and Miles Teller (Fantastic Four) to star in Spiderhead, a film adaptation of George Saunders’ short story sharing the same name. Netflix tapped some heavy hitters for behind the camera as well, bringing Joseph Kosinski (Top Gun: Maverick) on to direct from a script by Deadpool writers Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick.
It’s expected to be Kosinski’s next feature after Maverick finally rolls out to theaters, a movie that, coincidentally enough, also features Teller. Hemsworth, Reese, and Wernick are also producing the project alongside Eric Newman’s Screen Arcade, Tommy Harper, Jeremy Steckler, and The New Yorker Studios’ Oren Katzeff and Geneva Wasserman.
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The story itself is set in the a future where a medical facility offers convicts a chance to volunteer as test subjects for pharamaceutical experiments. It’s unclear what roles the aforementioned actors are playing.
Even as he continues to play Thor in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, Hemsworth is shaping up to be Netflix’s secret weapon. Earlier this year, Hemsworth starred in Extraction, an action flick from the minds of Joe and Anthony Russo and their AGBO production house. After Netflix swooped up the rights for the feature and it broke virtually all in-house records, the streamer quickly since ordered a sequel.
“It’s interesting, they don’t do a lot of projecting,” Joe Russo said about Netflix and its viewership metrics earlier this year. “They’re very guarded with their information, which is a good thing because you don’t set expectations up and then not hit them. So I’m happy with that as a filmmaker there’s not a lot of tracking to either get your hopes up or dash your hopes. It just performs and then you find out how it’s performing. When you think about the amount of people and if you were to compare that to a box-office release, then that’s the equivalent of a movie making over a billion dollars in the market like that. But that’s a significant impression on an audience.”
Spiderhead has yet to set a release date.
