“People keep asking me if I’m back.
Yeah. I’m thinking I’m back.”
Like his character on the critical hit John Wick, Keanu Reeves is definitely making a big comeback.
He won’t be alone, as Hysteria director Tanya Wexler has signed to helm the upcoming sci-fi thriller Replicas, starring the Canadian actor.
Reeves will play a neuroscientist mourning the passing of his family after a tragic accident who will stop at nothing to try to bring them back, even if it means breaking the laws of physics & going against a government-controlled laboratory and a police task force.
Produced by Lotus Entertainment, Fundamental Films and di Bonaventura Pictures (GI Joe, Transformers), the movie has been developed by Keanu’s close collaborator Stephen Hamel and written by Chad St. John.
If Replicas is bound to be St. John’s first produced credit, he is far from being a newcomer, having constantly delivered strong screenplays during the last decade. Discovered by Bruce Willis in 2006, he became the actor’s in-house writer for two years, developing original ideas and adaptations. Fate called when a friend of the actor optioned The Further Adventures of Doc Holliday, a project developed with Willis, attracting ICM’s attention. He impressed his new agents when he delivered his next original project: The Days Before, a sci-fi screenplay written in two months that quickly got the interest of Warner Bros and led to an epic spec sale. Fortune favors the brave: the script placed on the 2009 Black alongside another screenplay by St John and Bonaventura bought Doc Holliday with Paramount.
Replicas will also mark the return of the collaboration between Reeves and di Bonaventura, producer of Constantine and head of production at Warner Bros during The Matrix Trilogy.
A ’95 Columbia graduate, Tanya Wexler soon shot and released her first movie, the 1998 screwball romance Finding North. Three years later, she delivered her second feature Ball in the House, winner of the Washington DC Independent Film Festival and starring Jennifer Tilly.
The major shift would happen a decade later with the well-received mischievous romantic comedy Hysteria, where Hugh Dancy played the 19th century inventor of the vibrator alongside Victorian suffragette Maggie Gyllenhaal.
Lotus Entertainment will present the sci-fi thriller to buyers during the American Film Market in early November while Wexler prepares for production, set to debut in spring 2015.
Tanya Wexler and Chad St. John are both represented by William Morris Endeavor.
Find Tanya Wexler on the Hollywomen Directors BoardFind the short movie No Touching with Heidi Moneymaker & stunts by 87Eleven (producers of John Wick) on Kick It! Support Action Movies & Directing Awards
