Would you get a load of that? It’s only been four years since Brad Pitt’s Lt. Aldo Raine killed some Nazis in Quentin Tarentino’s Inglourious Basterds, but it looks like cinema’s 1942 Germany is filling back up with them again. Dammit. It’s a good thing Pitt recently signed on for a role in David Ayer’s upcoming WWII action drama Fury, so we can all rest assured that we’ll see another day.
Columbia Pictures has heroically stepped in to give this war movie a chance to see the world, acquiring domestic distribution as well as much of the international right. QED International will be producing the film with Le Grisbi Productions and Ethan Smith, with Alex Ott co-producing with Ayer, who wrote and directed last year’s action flick End of Watch.
“We loved this script the moment we read it,” Columbia president Doug Belgrad said. “This is epic and authentic storytelling at its finest and we couldn’t be more excited to be in business with David Ayer and Brad Pitt on this incredible story of sacrifice and heroism. “
Fury takes place in the last days of World War II, in April 1945. Pitt plays a hardass army sergeant named Wardaddy who takes a Sherman tank and its five-man crew into enemy territory on a deadly mission to take down the Nazi threat once and for all. Ayer started out with 2000’s German U-boat thriller U-571, and his career has come a long way since, usually with flashy thrillers, so it’ll be interesting to see where he takes this one.
This is Ayer’s second project with QED, who financed and produced Ten, Ayers’ star-studded action thriller with Arnold Schwarzenegger, Sam Worthington and Terrance Howard. That film will be out in January 2014.
We won’t get to see Fury until its tentative release date of November 14, 2014. Don’t expect that to move up much either, since the film won’t begin actual production until September of this year.
