Queen Latifah has signed on to star opposite Jennifer Garner in Sony’s faith-based drama Miracles From Heaven.
The actress joins Garner, who already had boarded the project, in the Patricia Riggen-helmedfilm, which is based on Christy Beam‘s book of the same name that recounts how her young daughter miraculously overcame an incurable, life-threatening digestive disorder.
Adapted by Randy Brown (Trouble with the Curve) the story centers on Beam (Garner) and a series of miracles that unfolded, leaving her family, her daughter’s doctors and the community baffled. Latifah will play a Boston waitress, something of an earthly angel who befriends the sick girl and Beam during their visits to Boston Children’s Hospital. She steps up to provide comfort and a helping hand when they need it most, and her life ends up transformed by her interaction with the family.
The film reunites producers Joe Roth, T.D. Jakes and DeVon Franklin — the team behind last year’s breakthrough hit Heaven Is for Real — and is seen as a follow-up to that film, which earned more than $100 million worldwide, becoming one of the highest-grossing faith-based hits of all time. Sony Pictures, which has been a trailblazer in the mainstream faith-based film market, has scheduled Miracles From Heaven for release on March 18, 2016, one week before the Easter holiday.
Miracles From Heaven was published by Hachette Books on April 14.
Latifah, whose last faith-based film was 2012’s Joyful Noise, also voices the role of Ellie in the Ice Age movies. The fifth chapter in that franchise will be released by Fox on July 15, 2016.
She is repped by CAA, Principato-Young and attorney Stewart Levy.
Source: The Hollywood Reporter
