Earlier this year, it was revealed that frequent collaborators Ryan Coogler and Michael B. Jordan – who have worked on Fruitvale Station, Creed, Black Panther, and Black Panther: Wakanda Forever together as director and cast member, and have other collaborations that Coogler didn’t direct – have been developing a new project in secret. Coogler has written the script for this project, which is being described as both a genre picture and a period piece that Coogler will be directing and Jordan is attached to star in. The project is set up at Warner Bros., is expected to have a budget of around $90 million, and is scheduled for a theatrical release on March 7, 2025. We still don’t know exactly what this movie is going to be about… but Deadline reports that Jack O’Connell is in talks to play the villain in it.

O’Connell’s previous acting credits include Eden Lake, Harry Brown, Skins, ’71, 300: Rise of an Empire, Unbroken, Money Monster, Godless, Jungleland, Little Fish, Lady Chatterley’s Lover, and Ferrari.

We’ve previously heard that this Coogler / Jordan project might be a vampire movie – and the folks at World of Reel went even further, sharing that it’s RUMORed to be about vampires battling the Ku Klux Klan! World of Reel has heard that “Coogler’s film would be set in the ’30s South, centering on vampires, with dual twin roles for Jordan and that it would be heavy in ‘anime influences.’ The ’30s Jim Crow South setting is not an accident. There’s been word that the plot would center on Vampires going to war against the Ku Klux Klan. That actually makes total sense given the setting of the film which is smack dab in the middle, and during, the height of the Klan.“ If that’s the case and O’Connell ends up playing the villain, we assume his character would be a Klan member.

This project is surrounded in so much secrecy that when it was looking for a studio to call home, “executives and buyers were forced to make the pilgrimage to the Beverly Hills offices of WME, the agency that represents Coogler and Jordan, in order to take a gander on the script and get details.”

Coogler (who is also developing a reboot of the TV series The X-Files) will be producing the film with Proximity Media partners Zinzi Coogler and Sev Ohanian. Rebecca Cho serves as executive producer alongside Will Greenfield and two-time Oscar-winning composer Ludwig Goransson (who won his first Oscar for his work on Coogler’s Black Panther and his second for Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer). Production is set to begin in April.

What do you think of the possibility of Jack O’Connell playing the villain in this project from Ryan Coogler and Michael B. Jordan? Let us know by leaving a comment below.

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