Action thriller Sugar Bandits will star Will Smith, while Sicario: Day Of The Soldado filmmaker Stefano Sollima will direct.
Will Smith is mere weeks away from appearing in Bad Boys: Ride Or Die, the latest chapter in an action-thriller series that has been going for almost 30 years.
Meanwhile, Smith has another action-y movie in the works. Called Sugar Bandits, it’s said to be a “big-budget action-thriller” written by Chuck Hogan, who previously wrote The Strain with Guillermo Del Toro and 13 Hours: The Secret Soldiers Of Benghazi, directed by Michael Bay.
According to Deadline, which first reported on the project, Sugar Bandits will have Smith play “a former special forces soldier who runs an elite vigilante squad working to wipe out the drug trade in Boston.”
It’ll be directed by Italian filmmaker Stefano Sollima, who has form when it comes to directing violent crime thrillers: his previous work includes Sicario: Day Of The Soldado, a sequel to Denis Villeneuve’s Sicario, and Adagio, a 2023 film about organised crime in Rome. The latter was the third in a trilogy of Sollima’s films about gangsters and in the Italian capital, following 2012’s ACAB – All Cops Are Bastards and 2015’s Suburra.
All of those movies – particularly the Italian crime thrillers were well-received, with Suburra even inspiring a Netflix sin-off series, Suburra: Blood On Rome. Sollima also directed the slightly less memorable action-thriller Without Remorse, adapted from the Tom Clancy novel of the same name. Starring Michael B Jordan as a former Navy SEAL on a revenge mission, it emerged on Prime Video in 2021.
Sugar Bandits is another high-profile film looking for distribution at this month’s Cannes film festival marketplace. Elsewhere, there’s Cary Joji Fukanaga’s thriller 77 Blackout, starring Mahershala Ali and Tom Hardy, while Francis Ford Coppola’s passion project, Metropolis, has found backing in the UK and Europe ahead of its Cannes debut, but is still looking for a distributor in the US.
More on Sugar Bandits as we get it.
