Apparently, The Hunger Games star has been hovering around Red Sparrow, an adaptation of a Jason Matthews espionage novel of the same name. A property of Fox, the film is also eyeing The Hunger Games director Francis Lawrence. If the two were to re-team, it would send seismic waves throughout Hollywood and the adaptation seems like a good vehicle for both, though slightly different from the type of projects the two have tackled before. There are no deals yet, but you can get an idea of what we might be in for from this snippet of the official synopsis of the book:
In today’s Russia, intelligence officer Dominika Egorova struggles to survive in the post-Soviet bureaucracy. Ordered to become a “Sparrow,” a trained seductress, Dominika is assigned to Nathaniel Nash, who handles the CIA’s most important Russian mole. The two operatives collide in a duel of spycraft, deception, and, inevitably, forbidden passion that threatens not only their lives but the security of America’s most valuable Russian spy.
Matthews is a CIA veteran himself and apparently parlays his far-reaching knowledge of intelligence agencies into quite the story — one that would be an easy sell with J-Law as a headliner.
Presumably, Lawrence would be cast as Egorova and that, of course, leads to speculation as to who who play Mr. Nash, the CIA operative that she’d be steaming up the screen with. Reports are that Justin Haythe is being hired to rewrite the script, which was originally penned by American Hustle scribe Eric Warren.
The project is still in the early stages of development, so we don’t have a release date yet and few other concrete details have emerged. If you’re jonesing for more J-Law, however, you can catch her in The Hunger Games: Mockingjay — Part 2 (Nov. 20, 2015), Joy (Dec. 25, 2015), X-Men: Apocalypse (May 27, 2016), and Passengers (Dec. 21, 2016).
