Netflix Greenlights Real-Time Missile Attack Thriller From Director Kathryn Bigelow

Borys Kit and James Hibberd
·2 min read
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Netflix has teamed up with Oscar-winning director Kathryn Bigelow for a harrowing ticking-clock thriller.

The streamer has greenlit a film centered on a group of White House officials scrambling to deal with an incoming missile attack on the U.S.

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Sources say the story will be told in real time and that its tone harkens back to Bigelow’s foreboding 2012 hit Zero Dark Thirty, which chronicled the hunt for Osama bin Laden and the Navy Seal mission to kill the terror leader.

Netflix wouldn’t confirm any details about the project, merely announcing an untitled Bigalow movie at their upfront presentation to advertisers in New York City on Wednesday.

The film — along with a Happy Gilmore sequel announced today — is the first movie greenlit by the streamer’s new film division head Dan Lin. However, the film’s development began during the division’s previous regime led by Scott Stuber, who tried for years to lock down a Bigelow project. The director originated the film’s core idea and then brought aboard Noah Oppenheim, the former NBC News president who previously oversaw NBC Today. Oppenheim also wrote the script for Jackie, the 2016 Jacqueline Kennedy biopic starring Natalie Portman.

Coming to terms with the new film wasn’t easy. Even before he officially started, sources say Lin, who is bringing a more cost-conscious ethos to the streamer, had a Zoom call with Bigelow and told her the project’s budget and its number of shooting days were too high. The filmmaker has since brought both down.

Details about the untitled film were first reported by Puck.

The project will mark a welcome return to Bigelow to the military thriller genre. In addition to Zero Dark Thirty, Bigelow helmed 2008’s riveting war film The Hurt Locker, for which she became the first woman to win an Oscar for best director. Among her credits are 1987’s vampire thriller Near Dark, the seminal 1991 action Point Break that starred Keanu Reeves and Patrick Swayze, and sci-fi thriller Strange Days, produced by James Cameron. She last helmed 2017’s Detroit, which disappointed at the box office.

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