Having wrapped a lead role in Michael Bay’s “Pain and Gain,” Anthony Mackie is in negotiations to join Ben Affleck and Justin Timberlake in New Regency and Stone Village Pictures’ online gambling thriller “Runner Runner.”
Twentieth Century Fox is set to distribute the pic, which Brad Furman (“The Lincoln Lawyer”) is directing from a script by “Rounders” scribes Brian Koppelman and David Levien.
Timberlake stars as a Princeton student who is cheated out of his tuition money playing online poker. He flies to Costa Rica hoping to reclaim his losses from the site’s billionaire owner (Affleck) and ends up becoming the corrupt CEO’s right-hand man.
Mackie is in talks to play an FBI agent who has spent years trying to bring down Affleck’s character and sees Timberlake as the key to his investigation.
Pic co-stars “Project X” thesp Oliver Cooper, who will play an Ivy League computer nerd who works for Affleck’s site.
Producers include Appian Way’s Leonardo DiCaprio and Jennifer Davisson Killoran, Double Feature’s Michael Shamberg and Stacey Sher and Stone Village Pictures’ Scott Steindorff, as well as Koppelman and Levien.
Mackie will soon be seen in “Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter” and “Gangster Squad.” He’s repped by Inspire Entertainment.
