For the last few weeks, streaming giant Netflix has been having a toil of bad news. From getting sued by shareholders for reportedly misleading them about subscriber numbers, facing online outcries over their cracking down on password sharing, and large layoffs across the company, Netflix has been feeling the effects of Mercury in retrograde.
Maybe the tides are turning, as Deadline reports that Netflix is snatching up the rights to Emily Blunt’s upcoming film Pain Hustlers for more than $50 million, marking the biggest sale out of Cannes so far for this year’s festival.
Deadline writes that Pain Hustlers “centers on Liza Drake (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.”
If Pain Hustlers sounds similar to other films of overly ambitious people getting rich and becoming corrupt, then you’re not far off. The tone of the film is said to follow in the same vein of The Big Short, American Hustle, and The Wolf Of Wall Street, so it seems likely we’ll see Blunt enact some severe forms of corporate girl-bossing too close to the sun.
The pharmaceutical feature is set to be directed by David Yates (Harry Potter And The Deathly Hallows: Part 1) with a script penned by author Wells Tower (Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned). Yates and Yvonne Walcott Yates will be producers under Wychwood Pictures, alongside Lawrence Grey’s banner Grey Matter Productions. Production for the film is set to begin in late August, according to Deadline.
Before Blunt gets ready to dive into corporate criminal activity, she’ll next be slated to co-star beside Cillian Murphy in Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer. She’s set to play Katherine Oppenheimer, a biologist and the wife of Murphy’s famous scientist J. Robert Oppenheimer.