EXCLUSIVE: David Ayer has found his next film for Netflix. He is set to write, direct and produce with Chris Long through their Cedar Park banner an adaptation of the Harlan Coben bestseller Six Years. Netflix has just acquired the book for Ayer, who directed the Will Smith-Joel Edgerton-starrer Bright for the streamer.
As Louis Leterrier finalizes a deal to direct that sequel – Ayer’s co-wrote the script and is producing – the filmmaker will lean into the 2018 suspense novel.
The title refers to the number of years that passed since Jake Fisher watched Natalie, the love of his life, marry another man. With a heart broken, he throws himself into his career as a college professor, while keeping a promise to leave her alone while he simmers in a slow building rage. His hopes rise when he reads that her husband died. Unable to help himself, he goes to the funeral and discovers the wife of the deceased man isn’t the woman he fell in love with. He becomes determined to find her and get the truth.
Ayer is in post on The Tax Collector, a gritty indie urban street drama he wrote and directed that stars Shia LaBeouf and puts Ayer back in territory he covered with End of Watch, Harsh Times and Training Day, latter of which he scripted.
Ayer and Long’s Cedar Park have also separately reupped his deal at eOne for television, after generating Ready For War and the Stephen Dorff-starrer Deputy.
As for the prolific author Coben, he is already in business with Netflix on his mystery thriller novel The Woods, which is being fashioned as a Polish original TV series that will be directed by directors Leszek Dawid and Bartosz Konopka and written by Agata Malesińska and Wojtek Miłoszewsk. The six-part series will launch later this year. It is the latest international adaptation of a Coben book for Netflix; the digital platform is remaking El Inocente in Spain with Oriol Paulo and The Stranger and Safe in the UK.
Ayer is repped by WME.
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