Sony Pictures is in the early stages of mounting a remake of the 1985 thriller Jagged Edge, as a star vehicle for Halle Berry. The effort is being led by Steven Bersch, the Sony Worldwide Acquisitions Group head who took over the genre arm Screen Gems. This one could very well be a standard Sony release, but they’re still working that out. The project is a priority and the studio has begun the search for the right writer to draft the new version.
Matti Leshem and Doug Belgrad will produce it. Scott Strauss will oversee for the studio.
Directed by Richard Marquand from a Joe Eszterhas script, the original starred Glenn Close, Jeff Bridges and Robert Loggia, latter of whom got an Oscar nomination. In the original, a San Francisco heiress is brutally murdered in her remote beach house. Her dashing newspaper publisher husband Jack is accused of committing the gruesome crime. He hires lawyer Teddy Barnes to defend him, and their chemistry spills into an affair. Even though the lawyer is falling in love, can’t shake the feeling that something isn’t quite right with the case, with the killer sending anonymous notes pecked out on an old typewriter. Is Jack the key to a happy future for the lawyer if she can get him acquitted in a courtroom, or is he a sociopath? The original was released when sexually charged whodunits were the rage. With TV minting money relaunching classic series like Roseanne, refashioning 80s concepts for price-minded updates seems a clever idea.
Weimaraner Republic Pictures’ Leshem has had success in female-driven thrillers, and Belgrad as an exec supervised the sleeper shark hit The Shallows, which made for an easy team up on this.
Berry was last seen in Kingsman: Golden Circle and Kidnap, and starred in the X-Men franchise and won her Oscar for Monster’s Ball. She’s repped by Management 360 and WME.
Source: Deadline
