In a piece of news that feels straight out of the 1990s, a new John Grisham thriller is heading to the big-screen and it appears The Partner has found its director in the shape of Emmy winning Ozark star Jason Bateman.
Tom Holland’s involvement in the project was announced earlier this year, with the Spider-Man star on producer and leading man duties, but now Universal Pictures has tasked Bateman with making The Partner his third feature film following Bad Words (2013) and The Family Fang (2015).
The Imitation Game‘s Oscar-winning scribe Graham Moore has adapted Grisham’s 1997 novel, which tells the story of Patrick Lanigan (Holland), a young partner in a Biloxi law firm who fakes his own death, leaving behind a wife and a new-born daughter, all in order to steal $90 million from a client of his crooked law firm. He finds happiness and love in South America. When the client who worked so hard to defraud the government finds the money is missing from his offshore accounts, he becomes determined to hunt down the lawyer he doesn’t believe is dead. That leads the attorney to have to turn himself in to the FBI and face up to the wife, child, and life he left behind.
Bateman has bolstered his reputation since his last feature outing, with the aforementioned Ozark earning critical acclaim, a stint directing two of the best episodes of underappreciated Stephen King series The Outsider for HBO, while he latest effort both behind and in-front of the camera, Black Rabbit, is currently streaming on Netflix.
The most recent big-screen adaptation of a John Grisham novel came in the form of 2003’s Runaway Jury. It brought to an end a run of success that included 90’s classics The Firm, The Pelican Brief, The Client, A Time to Kill, and The Rainmaker.
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Source – Deadline
