News

Exclusive: Eclipse Pictures has acquired worldwide sales rights to Tropico, a noirish thriller set in Brazil being directed by Giada Colagrande from a screenplay by Barry Gifford. Willem Dafoe, Morena Baccarin and Pedro Pascal will star. Colagrande previously directed Padre and Pasolini.

In Tropico, Willem Dafoe plays Raymond Sanz, a veteran operative hired to spy on Mark, an American businessman (Pascal) in a steamy costal town in Northern Brazil. However, things get more complicated when Sanz falls simultaneously for Mark’s wife, the mysterious and beautiful Lucia (Baccarin), and her equally beautiful identical twin sister, Olivia (Baccarin). “Barry’s atmospheric screenplay is an exotic thriller in the best traditions of the noir genre,” said Colagrande, “and I also couldn’t be more excited to work with such an accomplished group of actors.”

Nathalia Scarton is producing Tropico through her Bidou Pictures Brazil banner, with Jeremy Dawson executive producing. Eclipse’s...

Exclusive: U.S. outfit Eclipse Pictures has boarded the Skybound Entertainment-Radar Pictures thriller Exo, which Cedric Nicolas-Troyan (The Huntsman: Winter’s War) will direct.

Eclipse will arrange financing for the film, and represent it for worldwide sales. Casting will shortly be underway for an estimated spring 2020 production start.

Exo is an original screenplay by Adam Cohen. Skybound’s Sean Furst and Bryan Furst, and Radar’s Ted Field and Mike Weber, will produce the film. Executive producers are Skybound’s Robert Kirkman and David Alpert, alongside Eclipse’s Benedict Carver and Daniel Diamond.

In Exo, over-imaginative high school senior Nathan has spotted an uptick in local UFO sightings, and, when the new girl next door, Kyra, starts behaving mysteriously, he becomes suspicious. Defying his ultra-disciplined father, Nathan decides to investigate further, eventually coming to an unbelievable discovery. Bella Thorne and Jack Kilmer were attached to a previous version of the project.

On a humid summer afternoon in New Jersey, several thousand people are screaming their hearts out in a language they don’t speak. American devotees of Korean pop music have taken over Newark’s Prudential Center for the weekend; in the parking lot, the crowd sings along to a series of Korean-pop hooks by groups like Exo, Red Velvet and Bts, whose arena-rock stomper “Fake Love” gets the loudest shouts. Close by, a teenage dance group teaches signature moves from K-pop music videos; other stages in the complex host songwriter meet-and-greets,...