Netflix is getting on the board in a big way here in the waning days of the Cannes market. It has closed a $10 million deal for Wheelman, the Jeremy Rush-directed action film that will star Frank Grillo. Sources say they are also in talks to pay around $13 million for Sandcastle, the Fernando Coimbra-directed drama that stars Henry Cavill, Nicholas Hoult, Tommy Flanagan, Glen Powell and Logan Marshall-Green. That deal is in the process, but Im hearing that is how it is looking right now for the drama that was written by Chris Roessner, based on his experience as a machine gunner in the Iraq Sunni Triangle. Hoult plays a soldier who comes to repair a broken water system. It becomes a powder keg as some villagers welcome the effort and others are suspicious. The soldiers guarding him try to keep the tensions from escalating into a full-scale life-and-death situation.
Netflix in the meantime closed world on Wheelman. Grillo has been poised to get his own starring vehicle after showy turns in Captain America: Civil War, The Purge and the MMA series The Kingdom. He gets that chance in Wheelman, playing a getaway driver fighting for his life in a car full of cash after a bank robbery goes all wrong. At stake is his family as he tries to figure out who double-crossed him. Rush wrote the script. Producing is Joe Carnahan (Grillo starred in his film The Grey), along with Myles Nestel for The Solution Entertainment Group (which financed this) and Grillo, whos making his producing debut. J. Todd Harris, Chady Mattar and Scott Silver are executive producing.