Channing Tatum & Reid Carolin Circling Jo Nesbo’s New Novel ‘The Son’

EXCLUSIVE: Channing Tatum and producing partner Reid Carolin are in talks to come aboard The Son, the crime thriller by Norwegian novelist Jo Nesbo. The novel, which will be published in Norway tomorrow and by Knopf in the U.S. in May, was acquired by Warner Bros and Kevin McCormick’s Langley Park in late 2012. It’s early days, but I am hearing that the conversation is for Tatum and Carolin to potentially direct the movie together. They and McCormick just had dinner in Oslo with the author, who’s a rock star on his home turf. It did not go unnoticed by the local press. The hope is for Tatum to star as well, though it is very early days and they have to still set a scribe and get a script draft.

McCormick will produce through Langley Park alongside Tatum and Carolin, and Nesbø and Niclas Salomonsson will be exec producers. A writer is being sought right now. The novel focuses on a young man who is in prison because he took the rap for crimes that others committed. The thriller starts as the young man’s father, who is said to be a corrupt cop, commits suicide. When the son learns that his father was actually an honest man who was murdered, he escapes to avenge the killing. Along the way, he also begins to rectify the crimes to which he confessed.

Nesbo is about to hit big in Hollywood, best known for his series involving the detective Harry Hole. Those novels include The Snowman, a Working Title project that has Martin Scorsese and screenwriter Matthew Michael Carnahan attached. Warner Bros and McCormick just made a deal for Safe House helmer Daniel Espinosa to direct and Leonardo DiCaprio to star in Blood On Snow, which Nesbo has written under the pseudonym Tom Johansson. The books, which Knopf will publish in two installments, will be produced by Langley Park  and DiCaprio and Jennifer Davisson Killoran’s Appian Way, which is coming off Best Picture nominee The Wolf Of Wall Street. Tatum’s repped by UTA and Management 360.