Much like their streaming rival, Netflix, Amazon is bringing out the big guns in order to stake their claim as the superior service. In what might be their biggest coup yet, they’ve hired auteur Nicholas Winding Refn to direct, produce and co-write the series, Too Old To Die Young.
He’ll be joined on the Los Angeles-based crime thriller by acclaimed comic book writer, Ed Brubaker, longtime Batman writer who also produced HBO’s Westworld recently.
The project sounds so quintessentially Refn; the show will dig into the seedy criminal underbelly of LA and “explores various characters’ existential journeys from being killers to becoming samurai’s in the city of angels”.
It sounds like a combination of Refn’s early Pusher trilogy that first got him noticed as a filmmaker, and his recent aesthetically gorgeous thrillers, Drive and The Neon Demon, the latter of which Amazon helped distribute. The series has instantly been greenlit with a ten episode order, and will begin production later this year in Los Angeles.
Amazon will hope Refn will capture the same success as their other hit shows, Transparent and The Man In The High Castle. Refn isn’t the first major director they’ve hired to helm a new series, as they recently forked over a large sum to grab the new David O’ Russell series which will star Julianne Moore and Robert De Niro.
As the streaming world continues to branch out, the line between film and TV will begin to blur. Woody Allen‘s recent Amazon series, Crisis In Six Scenes, was practically one long movie and with (presumably) total freedom when it comes to runtime and content, Refn will have his own opportunity to redefine the medium. Consider the title of most anticipated show of 2018 already claimed.
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