Good morning: In today's edition of The Industry, we look at:
HBO’s Angel Heart, Paramount’s Midnight Library, and Moriarty.
Let’s go!
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The Brooklyn Film Festival kicks off today. Here’s our full interview with the festival director + breakdown of all the hidden gems:
https://theindustry.co/p/the-brooklyn-film-festival-lineup
THE INDUSTRY TLDR
Zac Efron stars in HBO/A24’s Angel Heart series from Zach Baylin.
Paramount buys Florence Pugh fantasy drama The Midnight Library for $36M.
Chris Hemsworth develops narrative feature around Tatts Finke Desert Race.
Netflix wins murder thriller series The Long Now.
North Road lands family-horror drama Sunken Meadow.
Karen Gillan joins Apple’s Shrinking for Season 4.
Kevin Bacon boards 20th Century Studios’ rom-com Beach Read.
Tony Shalhoub cast in CBS’s Einstein.
Greenwich Entertainment acquires Berlinale prize winner Queen at Sea.
Alice Rohrwacher teams with Our Films on adaptation The Baron in the Trees.
Janus Films picks up Cannes Jury Prize winner The Dreamed Adventure.
Fremantle and Archery Pictures develop Sherlock-adjacent Moriarty series.
Yesterday’s correct answer: Cedric Diggory, Robert Pattinson’s Harry Potter character.
73% got it right.
THE INDUSTRY NEWS
Zac Efron, Angel or Devil? In an interesting turn, Zac Efron, who played a wrestler in A24’s The Iron Claw, may now be reviving one of Mickey “The Wrestler” Rourke’s most iconic roles: Harry Angel in Angel Heart.
If you haven’t seen Angel Heart, it involves a washed-up private investigator (Rourke) who is contacted by a mysterious man (Robert De Niro). Trailer.
In The Iron Claw, Efron proved he can believably go to the end of his wits, so we’re interested to see what he does with it.
HBO and A24 are collaborating on the series from Zach Baylin (creator: Black Rabbit) and Jonathan van Tulleken (dir: Shōgun).
Paramount picks up North American + other rights for The Midnight Library starring Florence Pugh for $36M. The fantasy drama is a “love letter to life” from Lion director Garth Davis.
In a truly beautiful synopsis, Pugh will play a woman who finds herself in a library between life and death, given the chance to experience all the potential lives she could have lived.
The Midnight Library is being distributed by StudioCanal in the U.K., France, Germany, and six other territories, w/ Paramount handling the rest of the world.
Why did they pay such an eye-watering sum? Well, the model is already proven with StudioCanal/A24’s We Live in Time, starring Pugh, also as a woman caught between life and death, made $58.7M worldwide. Paramount wants a piece of the action.
Chris Hemsworth’s F1… in the desert. Chris Hemsworth and his production company, Wild State Media Company, are developing a narrative feature around the Tatts Finke Desert Race – Australia’s most extreme desert motorsport event.
Hemsworth has set an exclusive partnership with the race organization to produce multiple projects surrounding the two-day race. After watching Brad Pitt tear through the Mexican desert in the Baja 1000 sequence in F1 (2025), we got a glimpse of just how cinematic off-road racing can be.
Add that danger to Hemsworth’s racing-film charisma from Rush (2013), and this already sounds like a ride worth taking.
Tidbits:
In a competitive bidding war, Netflix has won The Long Now, a series from Mad Men writer and producer Semi Chellas. Taking place during just seven hours, the thriller series will follow a man racing against time in an attempt to solve his own murder with the help of his estranged ex. Through their first-look deal with the streamer, Jason Bateman’s Aggregate Films will produce alongside Chellas.
North Road Television Studios (Backrooms) scores big, landing Sunken Meadow, a drama pilot from writer Mac Smullen (dir. documentary short Children of the Moon). Described as being within the horror genre and rooted in a dynamic family drama, all other plot details are being kept under wraps. Margot Robbie’s LuckyChap is in talks to also board as a producer, potentially making this sale even bigger for the relative newcomer Smullen.
Mini Tidbit:
Netflix animators have voted to ratify their first union contract with The Animation Guild, with 89% in favor.
Trailers:
CW’s All American S8
Release: June 22
The Boy With the Light-Blue Eyes
Greek Coming-of-Age Film
SXSW London Premiere: June 6
Apple TV’s Sugar S2
Cast: Colin Farrell
Release: June 19
Netflix’s In the Hand of Dante
Dir: Julian Schnabel
Cast: Oscar Isaac, Gal Gadot, Gerard Butler, John Malkovich
Release: June 24
State of Firsts (doc)
Cast: Sarah McBride
Release: June 12
Mubi’s Fatherland
Cast: Sandra Hüller, Hanns Zischler
Netflix’s I Am Frankelda (animation)
Release: June 12
First Look:
Netflix’s On Behalf of My Son
Release: TBD
Release Dates:
Lionsgate’s John Rambo
Dir: Jalmari Helander (Sisu franchise)
Cast: Noah Centineo, David Harbour, James Franco
Release: June 4, 2027
Shoot dates:
A24’s Scapegoat
Dir: Ari Aster
Cast: Scarlett Johansson
Shoot Dates: November 2026 ~ TBD
THE ACTOR SPOTLIGHT
Guardians of the Galaxy actress Karen Gillan is heading back to the small screen, set to join Apple’s Shrinking for its fourth season. The entire main cast, including Jason Segel, Harrison Ford and Michael Urie, will return for the fourth season that’ll feature a time jump and an entirely new storyline.
While Gillan has spent most of her career in feature films, she notably broke out with her fan-favorite turn as the Doctor’s companion Amy Pond, on BBC’s Doctor Who.
Her next TV role in the Bill Lawrence dramedy is currently unknown.
Kevin Bacon joins the cast of 20th Century Studios’ rom-com Beach Read. Based on a NYT bestseller of the same name, the film follows a romance novelist who suffers from writer’s block while grieving her father’s death. During her Lake Michigan beach house getaway, an unexpected reunion with an old college writing nemesis reignites her spark.
Phoebe Dynevor (Fair Play) and Patrick Schwarzenegger (The White Lotus) star in the film as the leads. No info on Bacon’s role, but his suave charisma has always made him a natural fit for romantic comedies, with memorable appearances in Crazy, Stupid, Love (2011).
It would be interesting to see him as Walt Andrews, the deceased father of the romance writer who was keeping a dark secret from his family.
Tidbits:
Tony Shalhoub (Monk) joins CBS’s upcoming series, Einstein as a guest star. The show follows Lewis Einstein (Matthew Gray Gubler) – the great-grandson of Albert Einstein – who ends up helping a local police detective solve her cases. This role will reunite Shalhoub with the EP of comedy-drama Monk, Andy Breckman. Shalhoub will play Jack Einstein, Lewis Einstein’s father and the grandson of Albert Einstein.
Casting tidbits:
Mika Abdalla
Mary McDonnell
Zsa Zsa Zemeckis
Paul Sparks
All those casting tidbits here.
INDIE FILMMAKER SPOTLIGHT
Greenwich Entertainment has just picked up North American rights for:
Queen at Sea
Cast: Juliette Binoche
Dir/Wri: Lance Hammer (Ballast)
Prod. Co: The Bureau (A Little Chaos)
Synopsis:
As advanced dementia erodes an older woman’s ability to communicate her inner life, her husband and daughter struggle to act in her best interests, navigating love and the fragile boundaries between care, protection, and autonomy.
The film won Berlin’s Silver Bear Jury Prize as well as Best Supporting Actor for Tom Courtenay and Anna Calder-Marshall. Releasing later this year.
It has been a big week for Our Films. Shortly after their Cannes Best Director-winning Fatherland (dir. Paweł Pawlikowski), producers Mario Gianani and Lorenzo Mieli’s Our Films banner is joining forces with the La Chimera and The Wonders director Alice Rohrwacher on her feature film The Baron in the Trees.
Adapted from the 1957 novel of the same name, the award-winning story follows a young boy who is bullied so badly by his older sister that he decides to climb a tree and never set foot on the ground again.
Rohrwacher’s films always feel handmade, mixing realism and folklore. The Baron in the Trees is just right for her filmmaking style; she is capable of making any setting feel really immersive and a little magical.
Our Films and Rohrwacher will begin production after the latter wraps on her highly anticipated current feature adaptation of Audrey Niffenegger’s novel The Three Incestuous Sisters.
Tidbits:
Janus Films has obtained the North American rights to Cannes’ Jury Prize-winning The Dreamed Adventure. Part crime saga, part meditative drama, the film comes from German filmmaker Valeska Grisebach (Western) and follows an archaeologist who travels back to her dangerous hometown in the border region of Bulgaria, Greece, and Turkey.
National Geographic buys BBC’s docudrama Titanic Sinks Tonight, following the final hours of the tragic maritime disaster. It will recreate the dramatic elements of the sinking of the Titanic using actors from Northern Ireland and combine it with documentary interviews. The BBC miniseries was a major hit for BBC Two during its premiere in December 2025. Sony Pictures Television said it was the most-watched doc of 2025-26 so far. Nat Geo will launch the series in the U.S. on June 22.
Tony Award-winning Hollywood legend Nathan Lane is getting a feature doc on his life, career, and legacy from filmmaker Matthew Miele (Always at the Carlyle). With three Emmy awards and 25 Broadway productions under his belt, the doc will trace Lane’s extensive body of work on the stage and screen with appearances from famous friends like Matthew Broderick, Jean Smart, and Mel Brooks. It hasn’t been long since Miele’s last star-focused doc, Bob Mackie: Naked Illusion (2024), which is now on HBO.
Starboard Entertainment acquires Wardcliffe, a pandemic thriller starring Joel McKinnon Miller (Brooklyn Nine-Nine). Based on real events, the film follows a tense relationship between a father and a son who are quarantined together during the 2020 pandemic lockdown.
INTERNATIONAL NEWS
Everyone knows Sherlock Holmes, but a new series is in the works, shifting the spotlight to his greatest adversary, James Moriarty.
From Fremantle and Archery Pictures (Operation Mincemeat), the modernized crime series will follow Moriarty as a respected professor of criminal psychology by day and the architect behind an infamous criminal enterprise by night. From Ralph Fiennes to Andrew Scott in the hit BBC drama Sherlock, a number of high-profile British names have portrayed the brilliant, but ruthless, evil genius with all eyes on who will be cast to lead the new take.
With the villain at the center, the series promises a more twisted take on the Sherlock Holmes universe, with writers Chris Cornwell (A Discovery of Witches) and Oliver Lansley (Where’s Wanda?) on board.
Production has not yet begun on Moriarty (working title).
Mini Tidbit:
India’s Impact Films (Indian Distribution: The Zone of Interest) acquired both Cannes Palme d’Or winner Fjord and Grand Prix winner Minotaur – before the festival ever opened. The wins give Impact Films its third Palme d’Or acquisition, having handled the Indian distribution for Parasite (2019) and Triangle of Sadness (2022).
ON THIS DAY
1958. Annette Bening born in Topeka, Kansas.
Written by Gabriel Miller, Madelyn Menapace and Tony Jaeyeong Jeong.
Editor: Gabriel Miller.
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