EXCLUSIVE: Netflix has acquired Play Dead, the WWII thriller from Carry-On‘s Jaume Collet-Serra, which we scooped last February.
A deal figure wasn’t disclosed. Starring Noah Jupe (Hamnet) and Matthias Schweighöfer (Oppenheimer), Play Dead follows a shell-shocked soldier who, after seeing a deadly ambush wipe out his unit in the final days of World War II, must survive the night by pretending to be dead while surrounded by an enemy battalion of Nazi soldiers.
The project has previously been billed as Don’t Breathe meets 1917.
Collet-Serra directed from a script by Natalie Conway and Peter Stanley-Ward, with Sam Raimi and Rob Tapert producing for Ghost House Pictures, alongside J.D. Lifshitz and Raphael Margules for BoulderLight, Dane Eckerle for Bad Grey, and Akiva Nemetsky and Keaton Heinrichs for Nocturnal, which fully financed the project as its first feature.
Exec producers are Collet-Serra, Scott Greenberg, Chris M. Bonifay, Jose Cañas, Romel Adam, Chris Musselwhite, Louis Winters, and Michele Chan Soon-Shiong. WME Independent handled sales for the film.
Under a multi-year creative partnership with Netflix, Collet-Serra most recently set up high-concept cop action thriller spec The Cage at the streamer with plans to direct. He came to the deal on the back of the success of his thriller Carry-On, starring Taron Egerton and Jason Bateman, which remains Netflix’s third-most-popular film of all time. His first project out of the deal is the erotic thriller An Innocent Girl, starring and executive produced by Kerry Washington, which also stars alongside James Marsden, Chloe East, and Colman Domingo.
