Netflix has picked up the worldwide rights to the thriller “The Last Thing He Wanted,” based on the Joan Didion novel.
Anne Hathaway will star in and Dee Rees will direct, produce, and co-write the movie.
Hathaway will portray the hardscrabble journalist Elena McMahon, who finds herself on dangerous ground as the Iran-Contra Affair’s arms for drugs plot reaches its tipping point. The film is set to begin shooting this summer.
Bloom introduced the project to buyers at the Berlin Film Festival in February. Rees, the director of Netflix’s “Mudbound,” is co-writing the script with Marco Villalobos. “Mudbound” producer Cassian Elwes is also producing “The Last Thing He Wanted.” Jamin O’Brien, Wayne Godfrey, and Robert Jones are executive producing.
Didion’s novel, published in 1996, was set in 1984. It followed McMahon as she left her job as a reporter for The Washington Post, where she covered presidential primaries, in order to care for her father after her mother’s death. She inherits his position as an arms dealer for the U.S. government in Central America and struggles to cope with the spies, American military personnel, and the consequences of her father’s errors that are waiting for her on a small island off the coast of Costa Rica.
“Mudbound” received four Oscar nominations, including a best supporting actress nod for Mary J. Blige and a nomination for best adapted screenplay (for Rees and co-writer Virgil Williams). Hathaway will be seen next in Warner Bros.’ “Ocean’s 8.”
Hathaway is repped by CAA, while Rees is repped by WME.
