Milo Ventimiglia, Rosanna Arquette, Michael Biehn and Lauren German star in this Xavier Gens film about what happens after a cataclysmic bomb is dropped on New York.
SXSWAnchor Bay has picked up U.S. rights to the brutal, human-nature-at-its-worst thriller The Divide. The deal is in the low seven figures.
Michael Biehn, Milo Ventimiglia, Lauren German, Rosanna Arquette, Michael Eklund and Courtney B. Vance star in the story of what happens after eight people take refuge in the underground bunker a 9/11 survivor has built beneath their apartment building after a cataclysmic bomb wrecks New York. Xavier Gens directed the screenplay by Karl Mueller and Eron Sheean.
Ross Dinerstein and Darryn Welch produced.
The film first screened at midnight Sunday and was fielding interest pretty much immediately. Sony, IFC, Relativity, Xlrator, E1, Anchor Bay and FilmDistrict all showed interest in the film at some point over the next two days before four offers were whittled down to Sony and Anchor Bay, which secured its deal late Tuesday night.
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Preferred Content’s Kevin Iwashina, who’s also an exec producer on the film, co-repped the sale with WME’s Graham Taylor and Liesl Copland.
Repped by Paradigm and Anonymous Content, Gens is the French filmmaker best known for the equally brutal gore-fest Frontier(s). He also directed the 2007 Fox actioner Hitman.
The deal comes on the heels of several others inked Monday at SXSW, three days after the film fest started. Kino Lorber acquired U.S. rights to the doc El Bulli: Cooking in Progress from director Gereon Wetzel for its new theatrical label Alive Mind Cinema. The Weinstein Co. acquired rights to Dan Lindsay and T.J. Martin’s documentary Undefeated.
In a unique agreement, AT&T and Abramorama partnered Monday on a deal to bring Rodman Flender’s documentary Conan O’Brien Can’t Stop to theaters and U-verse TV subscribers. And IFC Midnight bought North American rights to Ben Wheatley’s SXFantastic horror entry Kill List.
Just before the festival started, HBO Documentary Films grabbed U.S. TV rights to A Matter of Taste: Serving Up Paul Liebrandt, and National Geographic Entertainment picked up North American rights to the documentary Benda Bilili!.
