Screen Gems Buys Action Heist Script ‘Reparations’ From Andre Owens & ‘Haunting Of Hill House’s Jeff Howard

Anthony D'Alessandro

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EXCLUSIVE: We hear that Screen Gems has preemptively bought Reparations, a script by Jeff Howard and Andre Owens described as an action heist movie interwoven with a socially conscious theme.

Various details about the script are being kept under wraps, but the pitch is: When a lost cache of Confederate gold falls into the wrong hands, an amateur crew comes together to get the gold and use it to fund long overdue reparations. A search for a director is currently underway.

Craig Flores, who was behind last summer’s profitable Paramount hit Crawl, is producing under his Bread & Circuses Entertainment label. Crawl received a shout-out on the Viacom investor call Thursday from boss Bob Bakish as one of three hits from the Melrose lot to make money alongside Rocketman and Dora the Explorer. Crawl, off a budget of $13.5 million, yielded global ticket sales near $91M.

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Flores’ feature credits include Sean Carter’s Keep Watching, the Gerard Butler movie A Family Man, Immortals and the 300 franchise at Warner Bros which has minted close to $800M worldwide.

Howard is a supervising producer on Netflix’s The Haunting of Hill House and an EP on Mike Flanagan’s upcoming Netflix series Midnight Mass. His feature writing credits include Flanagan’s Netflix movie Gerard’s Game, the upcoming reboot of I Know What You Did Last Summer, Blumhouse’s Ouija: Origin of Evil, and Flanagan’s feature Before I Wake. He is repped by Brillstein Entertainment Partners and VanderKloot Law.

Owens is a graphic novelist whose credits include such titles as The Bovine League and The Stoned Age.

Screen Gems provided no comment.

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