In what shapes up as another very strong Cannes title for next week, Jake Gyllenhaal is set to produce and star as Leonard Bernstein in The American, with Cary Joji Fukunaga directing and producing. BRON Studios will produce and finance a film that begins principal photography in the fall. Sierra/Affinity will sell international territories and Endeavor Content is repping North American rights.

Michael Mitnick adapted the script from the Humphrey Burton biography Leonard Bernstein.

Structured in five movements, like a symphony, The American follows Bernstein from conducting the New York Philharmonic at the age of 25 and through a meteoric rise to fame, all while struggling both personally and publicly to be everything that everyone expected him to be, most of all himself.

(more…)

Focus Features has acquired screen rights to the upcoming Kevin Wignall novel To Die in Vienna, and will turn it into the Jake Gyllenhaal star vehicle Welcome to Vienna. Gyllenhaal will produce through his production company Nine Stories alongside Riva Marker. Nine Stories exec veep Annie Marter will be exec producer.

The novel will be published by Thomas & Mercer in June. The pic is contemporized, but the tone feels like a throwback to paranoid thrillers like The Conversation.

Gyllenhaal will play Freddie Makin, a civilian surveillance contractor who for the past year has been watching Jiang Cheng, a Chinese academic in Vienna. When Freddie returns home early one day with a migraine, he interrupts a break-in at his apartment. The intruder escapes, but then comes back and tries to kill him.

(more…)

An A-list trio has been assembled for a hot new package, Finest Kind.

Jake Gyllenhaal, Ansel Elgort and Zendaya will star in the crime drama from Brian Helgeland, the Oscar-winning writer-director behind Mystic River and A Knight’s Tale.

The story centers on two half-brothers, to be played by Gyllenhaal and Elgort, that are reunited as adults after being raised by different fathers. When one discovers his estranged father has only months to live, he strikes a dangerous deal with a crime syndicate, putting him and his brother on a collision course with the Boston underworld.

Gyllenhaal, who is no stranger to the crime drama genre as the star of Nightcrawler and Nocturnal Animals, will next be seen in the Annapurna Western The Sisters Brothers. He is repped by WME and Bloom Hergott.

Source

If someone tells you that an actor is set for The Batman, that information is false. If someone tells you that a solo Flash movie is good to go, that information is false. While it may be fun to get the scoop, accuracy counts, and right now the most accurate assessment of Warner Bros.’ plans for the DCEU is that they’re waiting to see how Justice League performs. Anything beyond that is presumptive and trying to firm up details that the studio hasn’t decided.

Earlier today, a rumor surfaced that The Batman director Matt Reeves wants Jake Gyllenhaal to play the Caped Crusader. Our Editor-in-chief Steve Weintraub did some digging, and while he confirmed that Reeves and Gyllenhaal had a meeting, Reeves has also met with a few other actors as well.

(more…)