It may have taken the slow route of almost a decade, but Taylor Sheridan’s action thriller F.A.S.T. is finally on the, um, fast track.
In a deal involving high-level talks between Warner Bros. Discovery and Paramount, Sheridan has navigated a feature package that includes Brendon Sklenar, the star of the multi-hyphenate’s hit 1923, and that series’ main director and renowned cinematographer Ben Richardson, to land at Warners.
And how fast is F.A.S.T. moving? Warners has set an April 23, 2027 theatrical release date.
Sklenar, who also starred in last year’s It Ends with Us and the recent suspense movie Drop, will headline the action thriller with Richardson, who worked on The Fault in Our Stars and Beasts of the Southern Wild as DP, making his feature directorial debut. David Heyman and Jeffrey Clifford of Heyday Films will produce the project with Sheridan and Jenny Wood of Bosque Ranch Productions in negotiations to join them.
“The breadth of Taylor Sheridan’s body of work is simply astounding and unparalleled in sheer excellence and consistent quality and we could not be more honored to be making this film with him,” Warner Bros. Motion Picture Group’s Michael De Luca and Pam Abdy said in a statement. “With the hugely talent director Ben Richardson behind the camera and the exceptional producing talents of Heyday Films and Bosque Ranch, we are thrilled to have such an incredible creative team bringing F.A.S.T. to the big screen.”
The coming together of the F.A.S.T. deal in one way encapsulates the shifting vagaries of the theatrical and streaming movie business. And it also exposes the tricky nature of navigating inter-studio relations.
F.A.S.T. concerns a former special forces commando, down on his luck after he returns Stateside, who is tapped by the DEA to lead a black op strike team against CIA-protected drug dealers in his town.
Sheridan wrote the script in the mid-2010s, when he was an established feature scribe with movies such as Sicario and Hell or High Water Under his belt. Warners, then owned by Time Warner, picked it up in 2018, with Sheridan initially signaling he wanted to direct and Chris Pratt circling to star. Gavin O’Connor later came on board as director in 2019, but by then, the studio was owned by AT&T, which didn’t see a financial upside of releasing a movie with the budget in the $60 million to $70 million range theatrically. It was also, however, thought as too expensive to make as a streaming movie for its then-launching streaming service HBO Max. This was against a backdrop of a pandemic that was savaging the moviegoing experience and a streaming war that had gripped studios with the hallucinatory idea that streaming was the only future coming. Warners thus put F.A.S.T. into turnaround (only to have Amazon briefly flirt with it).
Now, a project that was once a Warners theatrical feature with a Marvel star that almost morphed into streaming feature, was reacquired by Warners, now part of Warner Bros. Discovery and back in the theatrical game.
But studios and movie releasing aren’t the only things that have changed. Sheridan’s lot in Hollywood has changed plenty as well. He created modern western Yellowstone for the Paramount Network in 2018, and it quickly became the most watched series on cable — a title it hasn’t relinquished. Soon, Yellowstone spinoffs such as 1883 and 1923 sprouted on Paramount+, becoming a major draw for the service. Sheridan grew to one of the biggest showrunners in Hollywood, scorching his brand on Paramount+ with shows Tulsa King, Lioness, and Landman, among others.
“Taylor at this stage is Paramount+,” says one insider.
The showrunner also has a strict exclusive deal with Paramount, which initially made moving forward on F.A.S.T. with Sheridan a non-starter — Until WBD head David Zaslav made it a priority. Sources say that dealmaking is still being finalized to give Sheridan a carve out from his Paramount pact to render screenwriting and producorial duties.
That wrinkle is making the setting of a budget for F.A.S.T. a tricky proposition, as Warners wants to settle Sheridan’s producorial involvement first, according to sources. It will likely be considerably less than the $65 million or so from over a decade ago, when it was initially judged to be too high for a theatrical release.
F.A.S.T. will be overseen by Warner Bros. Pictures president of production Jesse Ehrman and exec vp of production Kevin McCormick.
Sheridan is repped by CAA, LBI Entertainment, and Meyer & Downs. Sklenar is repped by WME, Neon Kite, and Goodman Genow while Richardson is repped by CAA.
