Warner Bros Takes Stephen King Bestseller ‘Billy Summers’, Bad Robot & Appian Way To Produce

EXCLUSIVE: Warner Bros. has acquired the Stephen King bestseller Billy Summers.

While in development, the feature project will be produced by J.J. Abrams’ Bad Robot and Leonardo DiCaprio’s Appian Way. If this comes out great, it could be a project for Abrams to direct with DiCaprio playing the title character.

Ed Zwick and Marshall Herskovitz are writing the screenplay.

This was originally packaged as a ten-episode limited series, shopped around to cable networks and streamers, as we first told you last February, but the decision was made that Billy Summers would work better as a feature.

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Billy Summers is a hitman who is looking to retire and takes one last highly lucrative job to feather his nest. The job requires him to embed himself in a quiet town, where he pretends to be an aspiring writer (he actually pours himself into the prose). He sets up in an office with a direct view of where hitman Joel Allen will be delivered to face trial for shooting two men during a poker game. Allen also has committed enough murders for some high-level mobsters to be scared the gunman will incriminate his former employers to lessen his sentence. Summers, a meticulous craftsman, becomes more and more cynical about the mobsters who’ve hired him, and his skepticism is well warranted as things go awry following the job’s completion.

This will be Bad Robot’s latest adaptation with King, after series Lisey’s Story, Castle Rock and 11.22.63.

King is repped by Rand Holston and Gang, Tyre, Ramer, Brown and Passman. DiCaprio is repped by LBI Entertainment and Hansen, Jacobson, Teller, Hoberman, Newman, Warren, Richman, Rush, Kaller, Gellman, Meigs & Fox. Abrams is repped by CAA and Jackoway Austen Tyerman Wertheimer Mandelbaum Morris Bernstein Trattner & Klein. Zwick is with CAA and Hansen, Jacobson, etc. Herskovitz is repped by CAA, Hansen, Jacobson, et al, and 3 Arts.

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