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A journalist wakes up locked inside a medical testing facility, gets told he is seriously ill, and then starts to mutate. That is the setup of The Cell, a creature thriller that has cast Joel Kinnaman as the journalist, Ryan Weaver. The Hollywood Reporter had the casting on Friday.
Ryan is on the verge of exposing a pharmaceutical company when he is taken. Inside, he works out that his captors are more interested in studying him than curing him, and that whatever the facility is building on its lower levels is worse than the disease. The mutation is what turns a conspiracy thriller into body horror.
Adam Cooper directs from a script by Evan Turner and Ben Zazove. “So grateful to have Joel joining us,” Cooper said.
Kinnaman has spent a good deal of his career in genre. He was Alex Murphy in the 2014 RoboCop remake, Takeshi Kovacs in the first season of Altered Carbon, and Rick Flag in The Suicide Squad.
Dear David Is on This Script’s Resume
Cooper’s last feature was Sleeping Dogs, the 2024 Russell Crowe thriller about a detective whose memory is failing him. Turner shares the story credit on Dear David, the 2023 film built out of Adam Ellis’s viral thread about the dead boy he believed was living in his apartment.
There Is Already a Film Called The Cell
Tarsem Singh’s The Cell opened in 2000 and sent Jennifer Lopez into the mind of a comatose serial killer, and a direct-to-video sequel followed in 2009. The new film is unrelated to either one.
Traction and Caravan Media Services are producing. Highland Film Group holds worldwide rights and is launching sales at the American Film Market, where Takashi Miike’s Bullfrog is also on the block. Principal photography is set for February 2027.