‘Marjorie Prime’ Producer Boosts Action Slate With Ethan Hawke’s ‘Tesla’ Revving

EXCLUSIVE: Passage Pictures, the Uri Singer-topped indie producer behind Marjorie Prime and the soon-to-begin-production Tesla starring Ethan Hawke, has added a pair of action titles to its development slate.

The first is The Redeemer, to be written and directed by Crank creator Mark Neveldine. The film centers on a Chinese police officer and Brazilian jiu-jitsu fighter who team to stop the deadly corruption inside the Olympic Games, only to find that someone very close to them has been taken hostage.

“This is going to be an amazing film, which will have some never-seen-before action sequences,” Singer said. “My Brazilian partner Mario Pexioto and I have wanted to collaborate with Mark for a long time, and we can’t wait to bring this to life.”

The second film in the works is Let It Bleed, written by Peter O’Brien as a follow-up to his 2017 pic Unlocked which was directed by Michael Apted. The new film will tell the story of a retired American MMA champion who returns to Brazil, this time as a lowly cut man on the periphery of the sport that nearly killed him. When he’s paired with a young phenom from Rio’s favelas, he becomes a mentor to the teen, which reawakens his dreams, and leads to an inexorable showdown with the very criminals who destroyed him.

Singer says the project is being eyed as a trilogy.

“Peter has written an amazing script and as the UFC is becoming more popular every day, we think it is time for a film which shows not only the fighting world but the human stories behind it,” he said.

Tesla, meanwhile, stars Hawke in the biopic about legendary inventor Nikola Tesla. It is written and being directed by Michael Almereyda, who previously teamed with Singer on 2015’s Experimenter, starring Peter Sarsgaard and Winona Ryder, and Marjorie Prime, which bowed at Sundance in 2017.

Neveldine is repped by CAA.

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