As revealed by Deadline, Nick Jonas (Midway) and Laurence Fishburne (Ant-Man and the Wasp) are set to star in The Blacksmith, a new action thriller from Taken director Pierre Morel.
The film will see Jonas playing Wes Loomis, “a ‘Blacksmith’ – the intelligence community’s go-to weapons expert. When his clandestine lab is destroyed and his colleagues murdered, he must go on the run with only his unique set of technological skills and the help of a brilliant, young CIA analyst Noelle Hazlitt to keep him alive. They seek out Mather (Fishburne), a retired blacksmith and Wes’ mentor, to help guide them.”
The Blacksmith is based upon Malik Evans and Richard Sparkman’s Kickstart Comics graphic novel, with Ben Ripley (Source Code) writing the script and Jon Shestack (Air Force One) and Jason Netter (Wanted).
“The Blacksmith provides a fresh, highly contemporary new take on the espionage genre and it’s exciting to pair an exhilarating young talent like Nick with seasoned heavyweights such as Pierre and Laurence,” said Stuart Ford of financiers and producers AGC Studios. “We’ll soon be announcing an equally outstanding young female actor to play across from Nick and then we will have all the ingredients for a major new film franchise built around a very modern breed of action hero.”
Filming on The Blacksmith is targeting a late 2020 production start date, with AGC said to have strong franchise hopes for the project.
