Earlier this year, it was revealed that frequent collaborators Ryan Coogler and Michael B. Jordan – who have worked on Fruitvale Station, Creed, Black Panther, and Black Panther: Wakanda Forever together as director and cast member, and have other collaborations that Coogler didn’t direct – have been developing a new project in secret. Coogler has written the script for this project, which is being described as both a genre picture and a period piece that Coogler will be directing and Jordan is attached to star in. The project is set up at Warner Bros., is expected to have a budget of around $90 million, and is scheduled for a theatrical release on March 7, 2025. Coogler has been assembling Jordan’s supporting cast over the last couple of months, and Deadline reports that the latest actor to sign on is Lola Kirke, whose credits include The Leftovers, Gone Girl, American Made, Winning Time: The Rise of the Lakers Dynasty, Three Women, and the project she’s probably best known for, Mozart in the Jungle.
Details on the role Kirke will be playing in the film are, of course, being kept under wraps.
Kirke joins a cast that already includes Jack O’Connell (Unbroken), Delroy Lindo (Get Shorty), Wunmi Mosaku (Loki), Hailee Steinfeld (True Grit), Omar Benson Miller (CSI: Miami), Jayme Lawson (The Batman), and Li Jun Li (The Exorcist TV series). Not only does Michael B. Jordan have the lead role, but he’s also apparently playing two different characters.
This project is being kept so tightly under wraps that when it was looking for a studio to call home, “executives and buyers were forced to make the pilgrimage to the Beverly Hills offices of WME, the agency that represents Coogler and Jordan, in order to take a gander on the script and get details.”
We’ve previously heard that the project might be a vampire movie – and the folks at World of Reel went even further, sharing that it’s RUMORed to be about vampires battling the Ku Klux Klan! World of Reel has heard that “Coogler’s film would be set in the ’30s South, centering on vampires, with dual twin roles for Jordan and that it would be heavy in ‘anime influences.’ The ’30s Jim Crow South setting is not an accident. There’s been word that the plot would center on Vampires going to war against the Ku Klux Klan. That actually makes total sense given the setting of the film which is smack dab in the middle, and during, the height of the Klan.“
Coogler (who is also developing a reboot of the TV series The X-Files) will be producing the film with Proximity Media partners Zinzi Coogler and Sev Ohanian. Rebecca Cho serves as executive producer alongside Will Greenfield and two-time Oscar-winning composer Ludwig Goransson (who won his first Oscar for his work on Coogler’s Black Panther and his second for Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer). Production is set to begin in New Orleans this month.
Are you interested in Ryan Coogler and Michael B. Jordan’s mysterious genre project? What do you think of Lola Kirke being added to the cast? Let us know by leaving a comment below.
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