Does Hollywood want to recapture the magic that almost got James Mangold and Timothée Chalamet an Oscar? That’s what they have in mind with the new project High Side.
Deadline reports the industry is buzzing about a new movie package floated by Chalamet and Mangold based on an unpublished short story by Jaime Oliveira. Sugar23, which represents Oliveira, is leading the charge. Chernin Entertainment is also attached as producer.
This would reunite the young actor and prestigious filmmaker following A Complete Unknown, the Bob Dylan biopic that earned eight Oscar nominations. Chalamet won the Outstanding Performance by a Male Actor in a Leading Role at the Screen Actors Guild Awards.
The outlet describes the project as a heist film. It reports that in High Side, “Billy is a former MotoGP racer, who is haunted by a career-ending crash and a family legacy of abandonment but is drawn back into the world of high-speed risks and extreme danger. His estranged brother, already being pursued by the FBI, recruits him for a series of bank robberies on superbikes. A gifted motocross rider, Billy walked away from the sport after a devastating accident, and he has been making do, caring for his addict father and the family garage. He’s blindsided when his estranged older brother Cole resurfaces — just after their father’s death — with a proposition: use Billy’s talents for something bigger: robbing banks.
“Cole assembles a mismatched crew, including a woman who becomes Billy’s lover, and they begin knocking over small-town desert banks with speed and precision. But as the stakes rise, Lennox, an FBI agent who has a complicated history with Cole, closes in as the crew preps its biggest score: a bank job timed with a big motorcycle parade. There are high-speed action and emotional twists and turns in the climax.”
Chalamet is currently reprising his role as Paul Atreides in Denis Villeneuve’s Dune: Part Three, which is now in production.
