Teddy Schwarzman’s Black Bear Pictures has set Eddie Redmayne to star in The Last Days Of Night, joining director Morten Tyldum and screenwriter Graham Moore to tell the story about the battle between industrial age titans Thomas Edison and George Westinghouse to electrify America. Redmayne will play famed lawyer Paul Cravath, in his first major career-making case. Schwarzman’s Black Bear teamed with Tyldum and Moore in The Imitation Game, and just before Cannes, Black Bear won an auction for this property, a package that included Moore’s scripted adaptation of his book on the subject that Random House will publish with great fanfare August 16. And Tyldum attached to direct as his followup to Passengers with Jennifer Lawrence and Chris Pratt. The Last Days Of Night will start production in the UK late January in anticipation of a fall 2017 release.
Getting Redmayne certainly adds to the prestige pedigree and distributors will be all over this one when Black Bear sets out to find one. Redmayne won the Best Actor Oscar for playing Stephen Hawking in The Theory of Everything, and was nominated this past year for The Danish Girl. He got a strong reaction from the Comic-Con Hall H crowd Saturday during the Warner Bros panel to introduce Fantastic Beasts and Where To Find Them, the first installment of JK Rowling’s Harry Potter spinoff, with Redmayne playing the lead role of Nate Scamander. Warner Bros releases the David Yates-directed film November 16. Continue reading »
