By Jake Coyle, Film Writer
NEW YORK (AP) --The Toronto International Film Festival may be over but it's biggest sale has just gone through. Netflix has acquired Richard Linklater's "Hit Man," starring Glen Powell, for $20 million.
"Hit Man," which Linklater and Powell co-wrote, stars the "Top Gun: Maverick" actor as a New Orleans psychology professor who also works undercover posing as a hit man for the police in sting operations to catch would-be murders. The film, a comic, existential riff on the hit-man genre, was one of the breakout hits of TIFF, which concluded Sunday.
Netflix didn't announce release plans yet for "Hit Man," which also played at the Venice Film Festival. The film, which co-stars Adria Arjona as a wife who wants her husband dead, is loosely based on a true story detailed in a Skip Hollandsworth-written Texas Monthly article from 2001 about faux-hit-man Gary Johnson.
In an interview in Toronto, Linklater, the veteran independent filmmaker of "Boyhood" said he and Powell elected to make the film before selling it to a distributor to avoid some of the pitfalls of modern Hollywood.
"It used to be the head of a studio would sit down with you, talk, maybe say, 'I think you've got the movie in you. Let's do it.' Now, they don't even want to hear from you. You're up against algorithms and marketing in advance," said Linklater. "So it was kind of great to go: 'Let's just make the movie and bet on ourselves.'"
That bet has paid off in a fall-festival movie market that's been disrupted by the ongoing SAG-AFTRA and WGA strikes. It's been speculated that, with pipelines potentially drying up, studios and streamers might be more eager to pick up finished films.
But the "Hit Man" sale is the largest yet of the season. Netflix, which also distributed Linklater's previous movie, "Apollo 10 1/2," earlier acquired Anna Kendrick's directorial debut, "Woman of the Hour," following its premiere in Toronto.
Harvey Weinstein hit with new sex crime charge in New York
Harvey Weinstein pleaded not guilty Wednesday to a new sex crime charge in New York, as he awaits retrial in his landmark #MeToo case.
Details of the new allegations were not immediately available. He was charged with committing a criminal sex act.
The jailed ex-movie mogul has long maintained that any sexual activity was consensual.
Prosecutors revealed last week that Weinstein had been indicted on additional sex crime charges that weren't part of the case that led to his now-overturned 2020 conviction. But the new indictment was sealed until his arraignment.
Prosecutors have said that the grand jury heard evidence of up to three alleged assaults — two in hotels in the Tribeca neighborhood and one at a lower Manhattan residential building. The purported incidents took place from the mid-2000s to 2016, prosecutors said.
But it's not clear whether any of those allegations underlie the new indictment.
While bracing for the new charges, Weinstein also is awaiting retrial after New York state's highest court this spring overturned his 2020 conviction on rape and sexual assault charges involving two women. The high court, called the Court of Appeals, ordered a new trial, which is tentatively scheduled to begin Nov. 12.
The Court of Appeals ruled that the then-trial judge unfairly allowed testimony against him based on allegations that were not part of the case. That judge's term expired in 2022, and he is no longer on the bench.
Prosecutors have said they'll seek to fold the new charges into the retrial, but Weinstein's lawyers say it should be a separate case.
Weinstein, who also was convicted in 2022 in a Los Angeles rape case, remains behind bars while awaiting his New York retrial.
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