Chris Hemsworth will star in Netflix’s forthcoming psychedelic sci fi prison flick Spiderhead, according to a report in Deadline. Joseph Kosinski will direct and Hemsworth’s co-stars will include Jurnee Smollett and Miles Teller. Teller has previously worked with Kosinski on the coronavirus-delayed Top Gun: Maverick and the firefighter drama Only The Brave.
Spiderhead’s script was written by the team of Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick, whose credits include 6 Underground, Deadpool, and Zombieland, and was adapted from the short story “Escape From Spiderhead” by George Saunders, which was published in The New Yorker in December 2010. It was later collected in Saunders’s New York Times bestselling book Tenth of December. A review in The Guardian, agreeing with previous critics who compared Saunders to Kurt Vonnegut and Donald Barthelme, added that The Simpsons was “an equally apt touchstone.” His later novel, Lincoln In The Bardo, won the 2017 Man Booker Prize.
“Escape From Spiderhead” is set in the not-too-distant future, and follows two convicts who agree to undergo medical tests for a shorter sentence. They are sent to a facility run by a brilliant visionary and given drugs that alter their emotions, leading to questions of free will, mind control, and other heavy concepts.
Hemsworth’s last Netflix project, the action-heavy Extraction, was one of the streamer’s most-watched films. A sequel is in the works.
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