EXCLUSIVE: Leonine and Lionsgate have closed a lucrative three-picture all-rights movie deal for Germany and Austria.
The pre-buy deal includes Borderlands, Eli Roth’s star-studded adaptation of the popular video game; White Bird: A Wonder Story, the companion film to 2017 box office hit Wonder; and action-comedy The Unbearable Weight Of Massive Talent.
The deal comes after the two company’s successful collaboration on Knives Out, which drew more than one million admissions to German theaters in 2020, and the recent acquisition of upcoming action-comedy Shotgun Wedding starring Jennifer Lopez, Josh Duhamel, and Lenny Kravitz.
Borderlands‘ A-list cast includes Cate Blanchett, Kevin Hart, Jack Black, Ariana Goldblatt, Jamie Lee Curtis and Edgar Ramirez.
In the movie, which is currently in production, Lilith (Blanchett), an infamous outlaw with a mysterious past, must reluctantly returns to her home planet of Pandora to find the missing daughter of the universe’s most powerful S.O.B., Atlas (Edgar Ramirez). Lilith forms an alliance with an unexpected team – Roland (Hart), a former elite mercenary, now desperate for redemption; Tiny Tina (Greenblatt), a feral pre-teen demolitionist; Krieg (Florian Munteanu), Tina’s musclebound, rhetorically challenged protector; Tannis (Curtis), the scientist with a tenuous grip on sanity; and Claptrap (Black), a persistently wiseass robot. The unlikely heroes must battle alien monsters and dangerous bandits to find and protect the missing girl, who may hold the key to unimaginable power.
Gillian Anderson and Helen Mirren are among cast of Marc Forster’s White Bird: A Wonder Story. The film, currently in post-production, charts the story of a young Jewish girl hidden away by a boy and his family in Nazi-occupied France during World War II.
Meanwhile, The Unbearable Weight Of Massive Talent stars Nicolas Cage as a fictionalized Cage who is creatively unfulfilled and facing financial ruin so accepts a $1M offer to attend a super fan’s birthday party. But things suddenly take a wildly dangerous turn. Also starring are Pedro Pascal, Sharon Horgan, Alessandra Mastronardi, Lily Mo Sheen and Tiffany Haddish. Pic is also in post-production.
Fred Kogel, CEO of the ambitious and growing film and TV firm Leonine, said: “We are proud to continue our close relationship with Lionsgate, an esteemed partner for top content, as we firmly believe in a strong box-office performance of high-quality event movies. We have built our theatrical slate as well as our digital and linear distribution based upon this strategy and will continue to do so.”