Latest in Brian Helgeland

Paramount+ has acquired Finestkind, the crime thriller from Oscar winner Brian Helgeland which stars Academy Award winner Tommy Lee Jones, Ben Foster, Toby Wallace and Jenna Ortega. A drop date later this year on the streamer is scheduled. Pic takes place in New Bedford, Mass., which is the biggest commercial fishing…

Jake Gyllenhaal, Ansel Elgort, and Zendaya have signed on to star in Finest Kind, a crime thriller written and directed by Oscar-winner Brian Helgeland (L.A. Confidential). It follows two brothers (Gyllenhaal and Elgort) who strike a dangerous deal with a crime syndicate that draws them into the Boston…

Playing twins on the big screen can get hokey and turn comical, especially if you don’t have the right actor. So when looking for the guy who would play twin gangster brothers Ronnie and Reggie Kray,  Legend director/writer Brian Helgeland went for the jugular and sought Tom Hardy. Helgeland caught the actor’s turn in…

“Your brother is a violent, paranoid schizophrenic,” is how one character describes Ronnie Kray to his identical twin Reggie. “What I’m trying to tell you is that he’s off his rocker.” Tom Hardy plays both sides of this volatile coin in Legend, writer-director Brian Helgeland’s movie about the legendary two-man mob…

Tom Hardy seems to figure in multiple threads of information tonight. Here’s the UK teaser for Legend, which has Hardy as both of the infamously ruthless Kray twins Ronnie and Reggie who dominated London’s criminal underworld in the 1950s and ’60s. Brian Helgeland is writing and directing the…

EXCLUSIVE: Legendary Pictures is courting Harrison Ford to play Brooklyn Dodgers general manager Branch Rickey in 42, the Brian Helgeland-directed chronicle of how Rickey and Jackie Robinson eradicated segregation in baseball in 1947. Helgeland has written a script after Legendary jump-started a long dormant project…

EXCLUSIVE: Deadline revealed this morning that Ridley Scott was returning to his sci-fi classic Blade Runner. His Scott Free partner and brother Tony Scott is also getting serious about a new version of a movie classic. Scott is in talks with Warner Bros to direct a reboot of the 1969 Sam Peckinpah-directed The Wild Bu…

EXCLUSIVE: FilmDistrict is closing a deal for U.S. distribution rights to Parker, the Taylor Hackford-directed thriller that will star Jason Statham. Production starts in early August. The John J. McLaughlin-scripted film is an adaptation of the Donald E. Westlake novel series, and Statham is playing a character that…

Legendary Pictures has announced it has made a deal to collaborate with the estate of Jackie Robinson and his widow Rachel on a feature biopic about the Brooklyn Dodgers second baseman who broke Major League Baseball’s color line. Brian Helgeland will write the script and direct the film. Legendary chairman Thomas…

EXCLUSIVE: What has happened with Sony Pictures’ plans to mount an exciting new biopic of Cleopatra, with Angelina Jolie attached as the Egyptian queen, based on Stacy Schiff’s bestselling book Cleopatra: A Life? I’m told the director conversation right now is with David Fincher, who just got a Best Director Oscar…