Following his “Armageddon Time” drama, filmmaker James Gray (“Ad Astra,” “We Own the Night”) has been attached to direct a series about the life of Norman Mailer and a biopic about a young John F. Kennedy. Still, sometimes, projects in Hollywood come together fast, especially when there’s a hot cast attached. And that’s precisely what’s happened with “Paper Tigers,” a new project that Gray will write and direct starring Academy Award nominee Adam Driver (“BlacKkKlansman,” “Marriage Story”), Emmy and Tony Award winner Jeremy Strong ( “Succession,” The Apprentice”), and Academy Award Winner Anne Hathaway (“Les Misérables,” “The Devil Wears Prada”).
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Leone Film Group will fully finance, with Raffaella Leone producing alongside Rodrigo Teixeira under his RT Features banner. Vincent Maraval and Kim Fox’s The Veterans will represent the international sales rights and introduce the film to buyers next week during AFM, while CAA Media Finance will handle the U.S. rights. The worldwide rights to the film are available.
Principal photography is set to begin Q1 2025, so it’s definitely jumping to the head of Gray’s queue. “Paper Tiger” is a tense and gritty story of two brothers pursuing the American Dream—only to become entangled in a scheme that turns out to be too good to be true. As they try to navigate their way through an ever-more dangerous world of corruption and violence, they find themselves and their family brutally terrorized by the Russian “Mafiya.” Their bond begins to fray, and betrayal—once utterly unthinkable—now becomes all too possible.
For Strong and Hathaway, this is a reunion, as they both starred in Gray’s aforementioned “Armageddon Time.” Driver is new to the Gray troupe, but the two-time Oscar nominee definitely fits in well with his oeuvre. Driver recently completed production on Jim Jarmusch’s“Father, Mother, Sister, Brother.”
Strong is currently in production on Scott Cooper’s upcoming Springsteen biopic, “Deliver Me From Nowhere,” and Hathaway is currently in post-production on David Lowery’s “Mother Mary” for A24 and David Robert Mitchell‘s “Flowervale Street” for Warner Bros.
Now, it’s possible this project could be ready by the end of the year 2025, but given how crowded next year is due to the layover from the strikes, the film may sit out until 2026. Either way, James Gray cinema is always more than welcome.
