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.
