Nightcrawler Director’s Netflix Movie Casts John Malkovich & More

Academy Award nominee John Malkovich joins Jake Gyllenhaal and Rene Russo in an ensemble cast for Dan Gilroy’s upcoming Netflix film. The streaming network will be expecting big things, as writer/director Gilroy’s previous collaboration on 2014’s Nightcrawler with Gyllenhaal and Russo earned him an Oscar nomination for Best Original Screenplay. His script for monster movie reboot Kong: Skull Island further helped catapult the film to more than $500 million worldwide at the box office. While his recent big screen outing, Roman J. Israel, Esq., didn’t score much with audiences on a fairly limited original release, that could change now that star Denzel Washington has picked up an Oscar nod for his role.


News broke last summer that Gilroy was hoping to bring his Nightcrawler stars back together for a film set in the art world, and Netflix picked up the distribution rights soon after. While details on the story are still a bit vague, Gilroy did reveal late last year that the still-untitled film would have “a Robert Altman-like large ensemble cast,” with a similar tone to The Player.


According to Variety, the film’s ensemble cast now includes Malkovich, a critically-acclaimed, versatile, and prolific actor who has four other projects launching in 2018. Also on board is British actress Zawe Ashton, who previously worked with Gyllenhaal on Nocturnal Animals, and Stranger Things star Natalia Dyer. Tom Sturridge (On the Road), Daveed Diggs (Wonder), and Academy Award nominee Toni Colette (Sixth Sense), round out the casting announcements.


The film is now being classified as a horror/thriller, and involves “big-money artists and mega-collectors who pay a high price when art collides with commerce.” Considering the eclectic cast, many of whom are accomplished on both stage and screen, Gilroy appears to be following through on his promise of an Altman-esque film. There seems to be potential for some dark humor here, and a scathing satire on the politics and extreme personalities of the art world.


Gilroy has said it will be very different from his previous films, though his illumination of unusual, complex, and uniquely driven people in his previous work suggests we’ll get some fascinating character studies in this new project. It will be interesting to see how much the movie will delve into the horror aspect, and how much it will take a more conventional tone versus something with a more twisted sense of humor.


This as-yet-untitled film was originally scheduled to release near Halloween of this year, but Variety only confirms the premiere will occur “sometime in 2018”.