With the first major purchase of the Cannes Film Festival in 2022, Netflix strikes a deal for the worldwide rights to the Emily Blunt package Pain Hustlers in a deal worth more than $50 million.
David Yates is behind the project described as being along the lines of wolf of wall street and The big short. According to the film’s logline, Blunt plays “a high school dropout who lands a job at a failing pharmaceutical start-up in a yellowed strip mall in Central Florida. Liza’s charm, grit and drive catapult the company and her into high life, where she soon becomes the center of a criminal conspiracy with deadly consequences.”
Wells Tower is behind the screenplay for the feature film project, which is being produced by Lawrence Gray through his Gray Matter Productions banner, along with Wychwood Pictures of Yates and Yvonne Walcott. Shooting should start in August.
The Pain Hustlers The deal comes as Netflix announced last month’s first-quarter earnings that showed the streamer had lost 200,000 subscribers in the quarter and was expected to lose another 2 million in the second quarter. Earlier this week, Netflix laid off 150 employees, mostly in the US
The deal marks the biggest sale of a sleepy Cannes yet. At last year’s festival. CAA Media Finance and The Veterans speed up the film in Cannes.
