Warner’s Shark Thriller Meg Finds Female Lead In Jessica McNamee

Buoyed by the success of Jaume Collet-Serra thriller The Shallows, Warner Bros. is cooking up its own spin on the killer shark formula.

It’s called Meg, a maritime thriller lifted from Steve Alten’s best-selling novel MEG: A Novel of Deep Terror. Jason Statham and X-Men: Days of Future Past alum Fan Bingbing are already on board, and today Variety brings word that Jessica McNamee has agreed terms to star as the female lead. Meanwhile, National Treasure helmer Jon Turteltaub is attached to direct.

Chronicling one man’s confrontation with the “most ferocious predator in the history of the animal kingdom,” Meg follows Jonas Taylor into the Pacific’s deepest canyon, a deep sea dive that leaves him physically and emotionally scarred. Alten’s work then courts Taylor back into the deep blue with the help of a hotshot female submarine pilot (McNamee), as they throw common sense to the wind in search of Meg – short for the long-extinct shark species megalodon, we assume.

Here’s a synopsis for Steven Alten’s source material:

Written off as a crackpot suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder, Taylor refuses to forget the depths that nearly cost him his life. With a Ph.D. in paleontology under his belt, Taylor spends years theorizing, lecturing, and writing about the possibility that Meg still feeds at the deepest levels of the sea. But it takes an old friend in need to get him to return to the water, and a hotshot female submarine pilot to dare him back into a high-tech miniature sub.

Warner Bros. has plans in place to unleash Meg on March 2, 2018. Jessica McNamee, meanwhile, will next be seen in tennis drama Battle of the Sexes and CHiPs.