Fresh off winning his first Academy Award for Oppenheimer, Cillian Murphy is looking to keep busy with another prestige film for Universal Pictures.
Deadline reports Murphy is attached to star and produce in an adaptation of Mark A. Bradley’s Blood Runs Coal: The Yablonski Murders and the Battle for the United Mine Workers of America.
Jez Butterworth and John-Henry Butterworth will adapt the screenplay; Jez is best known for his work on Spectre and Ford v Ferrari, while John-Henry is credited for Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny. They previously collaborated on Edge of Tomorrow.
Per the Blood Runs Coal synopsis: “In the early hours of New Year’s Eve 1969, in the small soft coal mining borough of Clarksville, Pennsylvania, longtime trade union insider Joseph “Jock” Yablonski and his wife and daughter were brutally murdered in their old stone farmhouse. Behind the assassination was the corrupt president of the United Mine Workers of America (UMWA), Tony Boyle, who had long embezzled UMWA funds, silenced intra-union dissent, and served the interests of Big Coal companies—and would do anything to maintain power. The most infamous crimes in the history of American labor unions, the Yablonski murders, catalyzed the first successful rank-and-file takeover of a major labor union in modern US history. Blood Runs Coal is an extraordinary portrait of one of the nation’s significant unions on the brink of historic change.”
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Cillian Murphy will play Yablonski’s son Chip, a labor attorney who makes it his life mission to get justice for his father. At the time of reporting, there’s no set release date for Blood Runs Coal.
Originally published March 26, 2024. Updated March 27, 2024.
