David Farnor | On 12, Jul 2020

Apple TV+ has picked up Snow Blind, a new thriller starring Jake Gyllenhaal.

What happens when you discover your parents aren’t the people you thought they were? For high school teen Teddy, life in a sleepy suburb in Alaska turns upside-down when he innocently posts a photo of his dad online, only to learn he and his family are in the Witness Protection Program. A man seeking revenge invades their town, followed soon after by pursuing FBI agents… but what if his dad’s reasons for going into the program aren’t as innocent as he says?

The movie is based on the BOOM! Studios graphic novel of the same name by Ollie Masters (The Kitchen) and Tyler Jenkins. Written by A Monster Calls scribe Patrick Ness, the adaptation will mark the English-language debut of director Gustav Möller (The Guilty), with Gyllenhaal attached to star.

Gyllenhaal is also on board as a producer, alongside his Nine Stories partner Riva Marker and BOOM! Studios’ Ross Richie and Stephen Christy. Adam Yoelin and Noah Stahl will be exec producers, with Mette Norkjaer co-producing.

Gyllenhaal and Möller pitched the project to bidders via a recorded video, with Ness talking through buyers with a multimedia presentation including how to make things relevant to our current pandemic-affected lives. The result was a hotly contested bidding war between six different parties, but Apple TV+ came out on top, with the heads of the tech giant’s video arm Zack Van Amburg and Jamie Erlicht landing the project – the second high-profile plucked by Apple after the release of Tom Hanks WWII movie Greyhound this week.

Apple has also recently boarded Antoine Fuqua’s Emancipation starring Will Smith and Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon, starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Robert De Niro.

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