Netflix has bought Emily Blunt‘s upcoming film, Pain Hustlers, at the Cannes market section, for over $50 million, Deadline has reported. The streamer’s splurge comes a month after it announced financial losses and a subscriber drop.
Pain Hustlers centers on Liza Drake, played by Blunt, a high-school dropout dreaming of a better life for her and her young daughter, who lands a job with a failing pharmaceutical start-up in a yellowing strip mall in Central Florida. “Liza’s charm, guts and drive catapult the company and her into the high life, where she soon finds herself at the center of a criminal conspiracy with deadly consequences,” according to the Deadline report.
The film will be helmed by David Yates, who is renowned for directing a few Harry Potter films, namely, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (2007), Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince (2009), Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Parts 1 and 2, and the franchise’s spin-off films Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them (2016), The Crime of Grindelwald (2018), and the latest The Secrets of Dumbledore.
Pain Hustlers is expected to begin production in late August.
The script is written by Wells Tower. Lawrence Grey will produce under his Grey Matter Productions banner, alongside David Yates and Yvonne Walcott Yates’ Wychwood Pictures. Lewis Taylor and Ben Everard are executive producing the film, with Cyrus Mojibi, Patrick Wade, Lawrence Kao and Lloyd Everard serving as co-producers.
Blunt is a BAFTA and Golden Globe winning actor, who came into the limelight for her critically-acclaimed performances in films like The Devil Wears Prada (2006), The Girl on the Train (2016), A Quiet Place (2018), and its sequel A Quiet Place Part II (2021).
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She was last seen in Disney’s adventure film Jungle Cruise, opposite Dwayne Johnson. The film followed the hybrid release model, and was simultaneously made available on the streamer Disney Plus.
Blunt is also set to appear in Christopher Nolan’s upcoming historical film Oppenheimer. The movie is based on the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer by Kai Bird and Martin J Sherwin, and is about the life of the famous scientist J Robert Oppenheimer– dubbed as the father of the atomic bomb – and his involvement in the Manhattan Project.