Jake Gyllenhaal has built a solid record when it comes to making films that debut exclusively on Netflix. It's still a new relationship, but it includes titles like Dan Gilroy's Velvet Buzzsaw, and Bong Joon ho's Okja (plus his bizarro turn as Mr. Music in the comedy special John Mulaney & the Sack Lunch Bunch). Now it appears that the star's filmography on the streaming service is set to grow once again, as the distributor has made a deal to acquire the upcoming thriller The Guilty.
News of this development comes to us from Deadline, which notes that the project marks a reunion between Jake Gyllenhaal and Southpaw director Antoine Fuqua. Five years later they're now working on a totally different project in a whole new genre. The project is based on director Gustav Möller's Danish film Den Skyldige, which had a Sundance premiere in January 2018.
The story is set over the course of a single morning (one is reminded of the contained sunup-to-sundown adventure in Antoine Fuqua's Training Day) and will star Jake Gyllenhaal as a police officer named Joe Bayler who is forced to work as a 9-1-1 operator following an incident in the line of duty. He receives a call and initially believes the individual is in serious trouble, but over time the situation proves to be far more complicated.
In addition to respectively acting and directing, Jake Gyllenhaal and Antoine Fuqua are both producers on The Guilty. The plan is for the movie to start rolling cameras before the end of the year, which both means that we should be hearing more casting announcements soon, and that it could be ready for release some time in the second half of next year.
The Guilty is one of many movies that Jake Gyllenhaal currently has in the works, with other standouts being the David Leitch-directed video game adaptation The Division, the Steven Knight-scripted mystery Rio, and the comic adaptation Snow Blind.
If The Guilty does actually come out in 2021, it will be one of two films directed by Antoine Fuqua released in the calendar year. This is because his next film, the thriller Infinite starring Mark Wahlberg, was originally supposed to come out this past August, but it has now been delayed to May 28, 2021. He is also developing a massive project called Emancipation with Will Smith, and working on a documentary for HBO Sports called The Day Sports Stood Still, which will analyze the shutdown of the professional athletics world as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Netflix has a tendency to not announce release dates until they are just a few weeks away, but hopefully this isn't the last piece of exciting news that we hear about The Guilty. As ever, stay tuned for more Jake Gyllenhaal and Antoine Fuqua news here on CinemaBlend, and to see what feature landscape looks like at present, be sure to check out our 2021 Release Calendar.
