Ron Howard was already setting up his survival thriller Origin of Species last year, but he didn’t yet have a cast. He certainly has one now. Ana De Armas, Jude Law, and Alicia Vikander have all signed on to star in the film, which is being backed by Howard’s Imagine Entertainment and financed by Stuart Ford‘s AGC Studios.
Noah Pink (Tetris) has written the script, which is based on two different accounts of the same true story about a group of eclectic characters who abandon civilization for the Galapagos.
They are all searching for the answer to that ever-pressing question that plagues us all: what is the meaning of life? The film is being described as “a darkly comic tale of murder and survival.”
This is also the latest big package to hit the Cannes market. A Howard film with this sort of cast shouldn’t have many problems attracting buyers. He’s coming off a similar film, Thirteen Lives, which was based on the Tham Luang cave rescue and had a similarly buzzy cast of Viggo Mortensen, Colin Farrell, and Joel Edgerton.
De Armas will next be seen in John Wick spinoff Ballerina, Law is currently filming crime thriller The Order and has historical drama Firebrand in post-production, which coincidentally also stars Vikander.
She also recently signed on to star alongside her husband Michael Fassbender in Korean thriller Hope.
Filming on Origin of Species is being lined up for winter 2023, in Queensland, Australia (which is summer there, of course). AGC will also be at Cannes with the Joel Kinnaman film They Found Us, an alien abduction thriller to be directed by Neill Blomkamp (District 9).
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