Ansel Elgort (The Fault In Our Stars, Baby Driver) is making his first jump to TV. He’s signed on to star in WarnerMedia’s drama, Tokyo Vice. The show has received a straight-to-series 10 episode order, and will air on WarnerMedia’s upcoming, as-yet-untitled streaming platform.
The series is based on Jake Adelstein‘s memoir, Tokyo Vice: An American Reporter On The Police Beat, Adelstein’s non-fiction account of his years as the first non-Japanese reporter at one of Japan’s largest newspapers. There, he covered topics like human trafficking, murder, and the Yakuza, until he uncovered a scandal so big that he and his family received death threats.
The series will follow Jake, an American journalist, whose descends daily into the neon-soaked underbelly of Tokyo, where nothing is as it seems, in order to uncover corruption. Short Term 12 director Destin Daniel Cretton will direct, while Tony Award-winning playwright J.T. Rogers will pen the script.
The series sounds similar to Nicolas Winding Refn‘s Too Old To Die Young, which hits Amazon Video next Friday. That also revolves around an underworld crawling with Yakuza, as well as cartel assassins and gangs of teenage killers. However, Tokyo Vice has the added bonus of being based on a true story.
Elgort will next be seen alongside Nicole Kidman and Sarah Paulson in The Goldfinch. He’s also set to play Tony in Steven Spielberg‘s West Side Story remake, and star alongside Jake Gyllenhaal in the crime thriller, Finest Kind. All those roles will likely mean he’s a big star in a few years, rather than his promising up-and-comer tag he’s currently straddled with.
WarnerMedia’s streaming service is expected to go live in the autumn. Tokyo Vice is the second official series order for the platform after Love Life, a romantic anthology series with Anna Kendrick and Paul Feig on board. The streaming service will reportedly cost between $16-$17 a month, which seems high. However, it will bundle HBO and Cinemax in with it.
We’ll wait and see if Warner can make a genuine challenge to the industry leaders like Netflix and Amazon. If Tokyo Vice is an early hit, who knows? It only takes one show to draw in a bunch of initial subscribers.
#Peace.Love.TokyoVice
