Olivier Megaton Headshot - P 2012
Getty ImagesCANNES — French action director Olivier Megaton, whose credits include global box office hits Taken 2 and Colombiana, has become the latest big budget feature helmer to move to TV, signing up to direct Taxi Brooklyn South, an action-comedy series based on Luc Besson‘s Taxi film franchise.
Stephen Tolkin, a producer/writer on ABC’s Brothers & Sisters and TNT’s Perception, will write and executive produce the first 12-episode season of Taxi Brooklyn South. Besson’s EuropaCorp Television and French commercial network TF1 are co-producing.
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Billed as an action-comedy procedural, the series will focus on the tight, if often strained, relationship between a street-smart, French-born New York city cabby and a driven female NYPD detective. The series will be shot in English mostly in New York and Toronto, starting later this year.
Taxi Brooklyn South is the second Besson film franchise to move to TV, following the problematic production of Transporter, which starred Chris Vance as the eponymous Frank Martin of the Transporter films. EuropaCorp was not directly involved in the production of the Transporter series, which was set up as a co-production between French groups Atlantique Productions and M6, Germany’s RTL and HBO sister channel Cinemax.
EuropaCorp, which is also handling international sales of the series, says it has pre-sold rights for the first season of Taxi Brooklyn South to multiple territories, including Russia and Japan.
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