Emerging from the inky blackness of development hell, submarine thriller Hunter Killer appears to be back on track over at Millennium Films, with Gary Oldman joining the cast in a key role.
Word comes by way of Screen Daily, revealing that the Oscar-nominated actor will star opposite fellow Briton Gerard Butler in the studio’s long-gestating feature, which is set to be offered to buyers at next week’s Berlin Film Festival. Adapted from George Wallace and Don Keith’s acclaimed novel Firing Point, Hunter Killer centers on a rogue Russian general who, upon kidnapping the country’s president, looks to spark a global conflict on the scale of the Cold War.
Despite developing a tendency of portraying Russians on screen (see Air Force One and Child 44), Oldman has boarded the thriller to oversee the efforts of a Navy SEAL unit – Gerard Butler’s Joe Glass included – to scupper those aforementioned terrorist plans. Behind the lens, Neil Moritz will produce with his partner Toby Jaffe, but Hunter Killer is still closing in on a director to take the reins. During its time spent languishing in development Philip Noyce, Martin Campbell and even McG have all cropped up as blips on the proverbial radar, though nothing is official at the time of writing.
Despite recent financial woes, Relativity remains attached to distribute Hunter Killer domestically in the States, though that is subject to change depending on the company’s bankruptcy. Shooting on the maritime thriller has been penciled in for July, meaning that that search for a director will surely intensify over the coming weeks.