Thanks to its economic budget (an estimated $12 million) and impressive box office haul ($$45.2 million to date), the Navy SEALs drama Act of Valor has to be considered one of the year’s surprise hits. The film has no star power to speak of, and comes from a co-directing team that, until now, had no name recognition. The industry knows The Bandito Brothers now, though, and everyone’s anxious to see what the team has in store next.
Deadline now reports that Valor co-director Mike “Mouse” McCoy has signed on for God’s Gulch, a post-apocalyptic techno thriller of sorts that finds a group of people banding together for survival in the wake of a massive systems crash that shuts down the world’s computerized infrastructure. In other words, it’s Live Free of Die Hard with real people instead of Bruce Willis’ cartoonish hero John McClane at the helm.
This news arrives on the heels of the announcement that McCoy’s Valor partner, Scott Waugh, would be tackling a fast-paced cops-and-criminals thriller titled High Speed for the Bandito brand, so yes, it appears that the success of Valor is immediately opening up doors for these filmmakers. As we previously reported, however, both Gulch and Speed will be put on the backburner as Waugh and McCoy dive into Black Sands, an action-adventure that they plan to shoot this summer with Arnold Schwarzenegger.
Gulch sounds timely and potentially terrifying. If McCoy can bring a touch of the realism and suspense that he helped bring to Valor, that could be a thriller worth tracking. We’ll continue to follow the film’s progress.
