Said willing person being, in the case of True Threat, Gerard McMurray, who previously directed The First Purge for Universal, and one of the better episodes of Jordan Peele’s Twilight Zone reboot. The film is being set up at CAT5, an action-focused production label that was founded last year with co-funding from production company Fifth Season, and which aims for action movies in the “$10 million-$75 million budget range.” As far as attempted comeback tours go, it’s less ticker-tape parade than scoring work in films that are likely to go direct-to-DVD as a matter of course, but still certainly more work than Majors was booking in the immediate aftermath of his convictions.
The film will star Majors as the ridiculously named Vernon Threat, and now we’re just going to go ahead and switch over to the provided plot synopsis, because it’s some fairly juicy pulp: “He embarks on a relentless quest for justice after his teenage son is murdered by a Harlem gang known as The Apollo Kids. Determined to take revenge, Threat infiltrates The Carter, a towering 20-story project building that serves as the gang’s stronghold, battling his way to the top floor to confront their leader and his former mentor, ‘Shallow.'” Which all sounds pretty The Raid/Dread, with the added twist that the film will apparently put a lot of its focus on the fighting style known as 52 Blocks, claiming to be “the first major film to showcase the discipline.”
Majors’ casting in True Threat comes after reportedly filming Merciless last fall; the film, which is apparently about a CIA interrogator whose wife gets possessed by a “malevolent force,” is being directed by Martin Villeneuve, presumably as part of an ongoing effort to get his name listed in print without journalists feeling obligated to add “brother of Denis Villeneuve” immediately after it.
[via Deadline]
