Joel Kinnaman

Source: Michael Schwartz

Joel Kinnaman

AGC Studios has dropped an early hot title into the AFM and announced it will finance and produce with Eric Paquette’s Meridian Pictures action thriller The Silent Hour to star Joel Kinnaman.

Brad Anderson, whose credits include Beirut, The Call, The Machinist, will direct from an original Boston-set screenplay by Dan Hall.

The Silent Hour stars Kinnaman (Suicide Squad, For All Mankind, The Secrets We Keep) as a Boston detective who suffers an accident on the job which leaves him hearing-impaired. Sixteen months later he is now an interpreter for the department and must battle a team of corrupt cops attempting to eliminate a deaf murder witness in an apartment building.

Paquette will serve as producer alongside AGC and the film has been earmarked for an early 2023 production start. Further casting is underway.

Kinnaman currently stars as the lead in Apple TV+’s sci-fi series, For All Mankind. He will next be seen in John Woo’s highly action-thriller, Silent Night, and Sympathy For The Devil opposite Nicolas Cage. His film and television credits include James Gunn’s The Suicide Squad, In Treatment, The Killing, House Of Cards, and Altered Carbon.

Erik Hyman at Paul Hastings negotiated the deal on behalf of Meridian Pictures with Paradigm Talent Agency on behalf of Anderson, and by SVP of legal and business affairs Anant Tamirisa on behalf of AGC. Kinnaman is represented by WME and Magnolia Entertainment.

Stuart Ford’s AGC Studios is currently in production on Richard Linklater’s Hitman starring Glen Powell and Adria Arjona, and is in pre-production on Anna Kendrick’s feature directing debut The Dating Game, in which she will also star.

Paquette founded Meridian in 2020 after serving the last 20 years as a senior executive at both MGM and Sony Pictures. The company has more than 30 feature films and 10 TV shows in development and recently sold series The Port Authority to Fox Broadcasting and The New Chardonnay to Paramount Studios.