Jack O’Connell, the star of Angelina Jolie’s Unbroken, and the Academy Award-winning Julia Roberts are set to join the previously-attached George Clooney for the Jodie Foster-helmed Money Monster, a fast-paced, character-driven thriller written by Jamie Linden. Daniel Dubiecki, who worked with Clooney on Up in the Air, and Lara Alameddine developed the script alongside Foster.
Clooney stars as Lee Gates, a bombastic television stock huckster, whose program (the titular “Money Monster”), and life, are taken hostage by an outraged gunman. As much of the world watches live, Gates must keep himself alive and, with help from the woman who produces the show, uncover the truth behind a tangle of big money lies. Said to be “taught and tense,” Money Monster unfolds in near real time.
Roberts would play the producer, Nancy Fenn, while O’Connell would play Kyle Budwell, a blue collar man pushed to his limits who serves as the story’s antagonist.
Dubiecki and Alameddine’s The Allegiance Theater will produce together with Clooney and his Smokehouse Pictures partner Grant Heslov. Alan DiFore and Jim Kouf wrote the original draft of the script. Principal photography is expected to begin in the first quarter of 2015.
