EXCLUSIVE: Lord Miller, the production shingle for Academy Award-winning Project Hail Mary helmers Phil Lord and Christopher Miller, is set to produce a feature adaptation of Forrest Brazeal‘s forthcoming debut novel Paradox Inc. for Universal Pictures.
Daniel Roher, the Academy Award-winning Canadian filmmaker behind Navalny and this year’s Tuner, will direct and co-write a treatment for the film with Matthew Robinson. Writer of the sci-fi horror flick The Last House, which just topped Netflix’s charts, along with the Gore Verbinski-helmed Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die, Robinson will adapt the screenplay.
Paradox Inc. is about the rivalry between a scrappy startup and a dysfunctional Big Tech company racing to build the world’s first consumer time machine. The prize: control of reality itself. Maybe… The tech industry’s version of time travel doesn’t seem to work quite the way you’d expect.
First-time novelist Brazeal is no stranger to Silicon Valley. He worked at Google during the peak of the AI and crypto crazes and is otherwise known for co-founding the technology marketing company Freeman & Forrest. Before catching the town’s attention with Paradox Inc., he found a wide audience with YouTube videos and webcomics skewering the tech industry. His novel releases with Penguin Random House on January 19, 2027.
Chris Miller and Phil Lord will produce the feature take through Lord Miller’s first-look deal with Universal Pictures. Lucy Kitada, who brought the book to the company, and Aditya Sood will also produce for Lord Miller, with Brazeal exec producing. Senior Vice President of Production Development Ryan Jones and Director of Production Development Christine Sun will oversee for Universal.
Roher won an Oscar for his 2022 doc Navalny on the Russian opposition leader and anti-corruption activist turned political prisoner of the same name. His first narrative feature, the crime thriller Tuner starring Dustin Hoffman, Leo Woodall and Havana Rose Liu, released in May, and he also this year unveiled The AI Doc: Or How I Became an Apocaloptimist, a Focus Features doc produced by the Everything Everywhere duo of Daniel Kwan and Jonathan Wang, among others. Currently, he’s in post on the Netflix caper Positano, produced by Working Title and starring Matthew McConaughey and Zoe Saldaña. He is repped by UTA, Range and Gang, Tyre, Ramer.
Lord Miller has had a banner year between Project Hail Mary, the Andy Weir adaptation sending Ryan Gosling on an interstellar mission, and the Nicolas Cage-led Spider-Noir series for MGM+ and Prime Video. Project Hail Mary has become Amazon MGM Studios’ highest-grossing film to date with a $684M worldwide release and is viewed as a likely awards contender. Spider-Noir, meanwhile, is up for 11 Emmy nominations.
Upcoming, Lord Miller has Spider-Man: Beyond the Spider-Verse, the third film in the Spider-Verse series, releasing in June 2027. Projects in the pipeline for Universal include Murder She Wrote; a live-action Archie movie; an adaptation of the novel The Six: The Extraordinary Story of the Grit and Daring of America’s First Women Astronauts; The Last Expedition by Carly Wray, based on a story by Weir; and Everyday Parenting Tips. There’s also Netflix’s The In-Claus, based on a short story by Travis Braun and Gabrielle Meyer.
Lord and Miller and their production banner are repped by UTA and Johnson Shapiro Slewett & Kole. Robinson is repped by UTA, 3 Arts Entertainment and Ziffren Brittenham; Brazeal by Circle Management + Production and Eric Showers at the Howard Morhaim Literary Agency.
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