EXCLUSIVE: Netflix has locked down rights to Hurt People, a legal thriller spec from Monarch creator Melissa London Hilfers, sources tell Deadline.
Details as to the plot of the film are under wraps. Written amid last year’s writer’s strike, it marks the rising scribe’s fifth feature spec sale to date. Greg Berlanti and Sarah Schechter are attached to produce for Berlanti/Schechter Films.
While Hilfers most recently created Monarch, a country music drama starring Susan Sarandon and Anna Friel for Fox TV, the writer is a self-professed justice junkie who more often than not, finds her way back to stories with the law at the center, as she has here. Previously a litigator at Cravath, Swaine and Moore LLP, she burst onto the scene with Undone, a legal thriller described as Gone Girl meets Primal Fear, which sold to Parkes + MacDonald and Black Bear in a competitive situation. She followed that up with another legal project, the Supreme Court drama Unfit, based on the real-life case Buck v Bell, which sold to Amazon Studios in another bidding war. After that, she was hired to adapt ’80s legal thriller Jagged Edge for Sony.
Berlanti and Schechter are coming off of Fly Me to the Moon, a NASA-set period romance starring Scarlett Johansson and Channing Tatum, which Berlanti directed from a script by Rose Gilroy, with Schechter among the producers. Prior to that, the pair teamed to produce Atlas, a sci-fi actioner starring Jennifer Lopez for Netflix, as well as the queer rom-com Red, White & Royal Blue, starring Taylor Zahkar Perez and Nicholas Galitzine, which was said to have brought “a huge surge” of new subscribers to Prime Video, and has a sequel in development.
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Among Berlanti and Schechter’s upcoming projects is Sasha, a psychological thriller reteaming the duo with Johansson, which Amazon MGM Studios recently won in a five-way auction, as we were first to report.
Hilfers is represented by UTA, Entertainment 360, and McKuin Frankel Whitehead.