Like countless Hollywood A-listers before him, White House Down star Channing Tatum has repeatedly expressed his eagerness to try his luck behind the camera, most notably on the green-lit Magic Mike 2. However, before production on that sequel to 2012’s smash hit gets underway, Tatum may have found another project on which to make his directorial debut. Deadline reports that Tatum and his producing partner Reid Carolin are circling an adaptation of Jo Nesbø’s crime thriller The Son over at Warner Bros., the hope being that both will produce and direct.
Though talks are in extremely early stages, it wouldn’t be that surprising to see Tatum and Carolin come on board as producers. After all, the pair have already collaborated on four projects (including Tatum starrers Magic Mike, White House Down and 10 Years) thus far, with plans to reteam on Magic Mike 2.
What would be more surprising would be if Tatum did become attached as director – it’s been widely expected since Steven Soderbergh announced his retirement that the actor would make his directorial debut on Magic Mike 2, the sequel to a hugely successful flick he was instrumental in creating (Magic Mike was in part based on Tatum’s experiences as a stripper). Still, Warner Bros. is keen to get Tatum involved not only as a producer and director, but also as the lead actor, and the story is juicy enough that he might be hard-pressed to pass it up.
The Son, a standalone novel, centers on Sonny Lofthus, a man serving time in an Oslo prison after confessing to crimes that others committed. When Sonny, a heroin addict, learns that his father was murdered by individuals who then set the death up to look like a suicide, he breaks out and goes on the warpath, aiming to take revenge on his father’s killers and bring his own brutal brand of justice to those whose crimes he spent years paying for.
That’s a highly intriguing premise, and Warner Bros. seems eager to get The Son out of the gate soon, so I’d expect that we’ll be hearing more about Tatum and Carolin’s involvement in the next few weeks.
The Son is just one of several Nesbø novels in development. HBO is working on an adaptation of his novel Headhunters, Leonardo DiCaprio is primed to star in Warner Bros.’s Blood on the Snow, and Martin Scorsese has been circling an adaptation of Nesbø’s Harry Hole detective novel The Snowman.
Check out the full synopsis for The Son below and stay tuned, as we’ll be sure to keep you updated as more on Tatum and Carolin’s potential involvement is revealed.
The author of the best-selling Harry Hole series now gives us an electrifying stand-alone novel set inside Oslo’s maze of especially venal, high-level corruption.
Sonny Lofthus is a strangely charismatic and complacent young man. Sonny’s been in prison for a dozen years, nearly half his life. The inmates who seek out his uncanny abilities to soothe leave his cell feeling absolved. They don’t know or care that Sonny has a serious heroin habit—or where or how he gets his uninterrupted supply of the drug. Or that he’s serving time for other peoples’ crimes.
Sonny took the first steps toward addiction when his father took his own life rather than face exposure as a corrupt cop. Now Sonny is the seemingly malleable center of a whole infrastructure of corruption: prison staff, police, lawyers, a desperate priest—all of them focused on keeping him high and in jail. And all of them under the thumb of the Twin, Oslo’s crime overlord. As long as Sonny gets his dope, he’s happy to play the criminal and the prison’s in-house savior.
But when he learns a stunning, long-hidden secret concerning his father, he makes a brilliantly executed escape from prison—and from the person he’d let himself become—and begins hunting down those responsible for the crimes against him . . . The darkly looming question is: Who will get to him first—the criminals or the cops?