Skydance has found its Fortune.
Coming out on top of a competitive situation, the company is in negotiations to pick up Fortune, an adventure movie package that has Reacher headliner Alan Ritchson attached to star.
Pending deals signing, Neil Widener and Gavin James, who worked on the (almost) billion dollar-grossing A Minecraft Movie, will write the script based on their own short story. Jerry Bruckheimer, who knows a thing or two about globe-trotting fortune-hunting thanks to making movies such as Pirates of the Caribbean and National Treasure, will produce, as will Ritchson.
Bruckheimer previously worked with Ritchson on last year’s Guy Ritchie action thriller, The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare, on which the actor was part of the ensemble cast. With Fortune, Ritchson will be front and center.
Details are being kept under lock and key but the project has been described as Memento meets Raiders of the Lost Ark.
Skydance did not comment on the dealmaking.
Andrew Schneider will exec produce. The project marks the latest feature push for Ritchson, who has already found his own, um, fortune on the TV side with Reacher, Prime Video’s action adventure series that is the most streamed original show of the year for the company, and in the top three of all streaming. The series, which unveiled its third season earlier this year, is also in the top three of all time for Prime.
The actor, repped by WME and Hansen Jacobson, has been beefing up his movie resume in recent years, appearing in 2023’s Fast X and the aforementioned Ungentlemanly Warfare. He is attached to star in Counting Miracles, an adaptation of the Nicholas Sparks novel being developed by Amazon MGM.
Film veteran Bruckheimer, repped by CAA, continues to be as busy as ever. He is prepping for the release of one of the potentially biggest movies of the summer, F1, the Formula 1 racing movie that stars Brad Pitt and is directed by Joseph Kosinski. And he’s continuing to set up project after project: Fortune is his latest original one following a major Apple deal for an untitled UFO conspiracy thriller that will re-team him with Kosinski. That is in addition to developing new installments of Pirates and Treasure at Disney, another Bad Boys at Sony, another Top Gun at Paramount, among others around town.
Widener and James’ Minecraft opened to a record-breaking $163 million, making it the biggest video-game adaptation of all time. The movie has now crossed the $930 million mark. They are now adapting video game franchise Jak and Daxter for Sony/PlayStation with Ruben Fleischer attached to direct.
The busy writers previously worked on a sequel to San Andreas for New Line, Hot Wheels for Warners and Mattel, Beyblade for Paramount, and an early draft of Now You See Me 3, among many other scripts.
The duo is repped by CAA, Untitled, and Johnson Shapiro.
