Netflix Developing ‘Forty Acres’ Movie With ‘Luke Cage’ Creator Cheo Hodari Coker & Producers James Lassiter, Jay-Z & Aaron Kaplan

EXCLUSIVE: Netflix is in early development on the feature film adaptation of the Dwayne Alexander Smith novel Forty Acres, which Luke Cage creator Cheo Hodari Coker will write.

Forty Acres follows a civil rights attorney who must fight for survival when he’s invited to join an elite Black organization with a mind-blowing secret; the thriller is described as being a cross between The Firm and Get Out.

James Lassiter, Jay-Z, Kapital Entertainment’s Aaron Kaplan produce with Niles Kirchner and Bill Strauss. Executive producers are Dana Honor for Kapital, Smith and Mike Epps.

This marks the first movie project for Kapital, whose principal Kaplan identified the adaptation of the 2015 Simon & Schuster book as better suited as a feature when it was pitched to him for TV. Forty Acres reunites Kaplan with Jay-Z and Lassiter, his partners on the upcoming high-profile ABC limited series Women of the Movement.

Jay-Z and Lassiter recently produced the all-Black western The Harder They Fall for the streamer.

Coker, who is repped by Darrell D Miller of Fox Rothschild and Literate Management, is currently in a multi-year television overall deal at Amazon. He was the creator, showrunner and EP of Netflix/Marvel’s Luke Cage. He won an NAACP Image Award for Best Writing in a Dramatic Series for his work on TNT’s Southland. On the feature side, he’s currently writing Diary of a Trap God, based on the Gucci Mane autobiography for Paramount/Imagine, as well as the sequel to the 2005 feature Four Brothers for Paramount. His other feature credits include Creed II, Lowriders and Notorious plus uncredited work on Straight Outta Compton and All Eyez on Me. Coker is a former journalist for Vibe, Spin, Rolling Stone and the LA Times, and was the last person to interview Notorious B.I.G. before he was murdered.

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