It's been a tough year for CBS Films with a bunch of tepid releases and even worse box office returns (Extraordinary Measures, The Mechanic and Faster to name but a few) but the studio has been more aggressive in the markets lately and hope the recent acquisitions of the Colin Firth/Cameron Diaz caper
Gambit, the Daniel Radcliffe starrer
The Woman in Black and even an adaptation of
Stephen King's The Stand they are developing, can bring them better luck.
Deadline say they even want to get in on the franchise gig, tapping director
Edward Zwick (Defiance, Blood Diamond) to launch the first of a series of films based on
Vince Flynn's C.I.A. agent/terrorist hunter Mitch Rapp - beginning with an adaptation of last year's published story
American Assassin. The novel is actually the 11th book in the Rapp series but as it's a prequel of how "as a college scholar and athlete, tragedy forged Rapps path to become a ruthless hunter of terrorists for the CIA" they see it as a fitting starting point. CBS have been trying to get a movie based on Flynn's series for a while and as recently as last year they had hired
Antoine Fuqua (Training Day, Shooter) to bring the twisty thriller
Consent To Kill to the big screen, which had
Colin Farrell, Gerard Butler and
Matthew Fox circling and focused on an older Rapp. But for reasons unexplained they are skewing younger this time and it's more likely to be Shia LaBeouf or if we are lucky an Emile Hirsch type who might end up with the job. Zwick is now writing the script with his Love & Other Drugs and The Last Samurai co-writer
Marshall Herskovitz, joining
Lorenzo di Bonaventura and
Nick Wechsler as producers. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TWb9BMkzsaM Having not read the series, I'm not sure if there's anything that stands out about this Mitch Rapp character but I'm always game for movies in the Jack Ryan wheelhouse. And Zwick, when he is on the ball, can make solid pictures.