A24 is backing The Riders, which has Brad Pitt starring and Edward Berger directing. A bit more information on the movie here.
We’ve been waiting for what seems like an age to find out what Edward Berger’s follow up to Conclave will be, but now the director is now being attached to projects with alarming haste.
He’s been continously linked to reviving superspies on both sides of the Atlantic in the form of both James Bond and Jason Bourne, but Berger was eventually announced as the director of Barrier, a time travel thriller starring Austin Butler. Beyond that though, it sounds as though the filmmaker will be teaming up with Brad Pitt to take on a globe-spanning thriller for A24.
The project is set to be an adaptation of author Tim Winton’s novel The Riders, and follows – per Wikipedia’s plot description:
‘Fred Scully, whose family plans to move from Australia to a cottage they have purchased in Ireland. Having gotten there first, Fred awaits his wife and daughter, who are due to arrive by plane. However at the airport, only the daughter arrives – traumatised and unable to tell her father what has happened or why her mother put her on the plane alone.’
Read more: Conclave review | A bloody good papal thriller
The set-up certainly sounds intriguing and seeing Brad Pitt deploy his photogenic frown across multiple continents has proved to be a winning formula in the past.
Like Berger, Brad Pitt is pretty busy in the short-term. He’ll be promoting his Formula 1 racing movie F1 this summer, before presumably moving onto The Continuing Adventures Of Cliff Booth, the Once Upon A Time… In Hollywood spin-off that’s being set up at Netflix and directed by David Fincher.
When both men have completed their next projects though, it sounds as though The Riders will be next on their slate, with production slated for an early 2026 shoot.
Ridley Scott’s Scott Free, Berger’s Nine Hours and Pitt’s Plan B are all producing with the script coming from Bones And All's David Kajganich (thanks, Variety). The action will be filmed across various European countries.
We’ll bring you more on The Riders as we hear it.
