EXCLUSIVE: Apple Original Films and Chernin Entertainment are set to develop the action spec Five Secrets from writers Andrew Barrer and Gabriel Ferrari, based on an original short story by writer Julianna Baggott. Peter Chernin and David Ready will produce for The North Road Company’s Chernin Entertainment. Ready, who was recently elevated to President of Film at Chernin, oversees the company’s film slate including its first-look feature deal with Apple TV+.
The project marks one of the first features under Chernin Entertainment’s Apple TV+ deal.
The plot is set in a world where the average person has five secrets they’ve never told a living soul; get just one of them, and you have control over its keeper. Hedrick is a highly skilled mercenary who trades in exactly these kinds of secrets — staging elaborate near-death experiences to get powerful people to unknowingly confess to theirs. His own biggest secret is that he desperately wants out, and when his employers find out, he’ll be killed. So when he’s sent on a strange mission to extract a secret from his former mentor, he knows: figuring out the secret being kept from him will be the only way he gets out alive.
When the spec script started to create buzz after the plan was to initially package it, Chernin Entertainment and Apple acted fast and pre-emptively acquired the project, taking it off the market.
Chernin Entertainment has produced multiple projects for Apple TV+ including the acclaimed epic Chief of War starring Jason Momoa, the Emmy-nominated See also starring Momoa, NAACP Image Award-winning Truth Be Told starring Octavia Spencer and Gabrielle Union, and Emmy-winning documentary series The War for Football.
Barrer and Ferrari, who will also serve as executive producers, are the screenwriting duo behind Marvel’s Ant-Man and the Wasp and Transformers One. They are repped by 3 Arts and CAA.
Baggot, who will also serve as executive producer, is a novelist, essayist, poet and associate professor at Florida State University’s College of Motion Picture Arts. She is repped by 3 Arts and WME.
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