In what willquickly become one of the hot film packages on the Croisette, Deadline hears that Avengers: Endgame‘s Chris Hemsworth is teaming up with Girls Trip‘s Tiffany Haddish on Down Under Cover, a two-hander buddy cop action comedy that is being mounted in the spirit of films like 48 Hours, Rush Hourand The Heat. Script is by Peter Hoare.
The package will be introduced at Cannes by CAA (brokering domestic) and FilmNation, which will handle international sales. Those two have done well making star-driven content available to the international buying community, with successful recent packages including 355 — the global spy thriller that sold out to the walls last Cannes, including a $20M Universal U.S. deal for the Simon Kinberg-directed film that will star Jessica Chastain, Marion Cotillard, Penelope Cruz, Fan Bingbing and Lupita Nyong’o — the George Miller-directed 3000 Years Of Longing, and Knives Out, the contained whodunit that Rian Johnson directed with Daniel Craig leading the ensemble cast.
In Down Under Cover, Hemsworth will play a detective who goes undercover to crack a series of baffling casino heists in which the prime suspects are a troupe of Australian male erotic dancers. He’s forced to take the partner no one else will — Haddish’s character, a lone wolf who does things only one way: hers. Together they have to work as an unlikely duo to solve the crime of their careers. Along with the requisite beefcake physique and Aussie accent, Hemsworth has comic chops he has shown flashes of in films from Ghostbusters to Thor: Ragnarok and Avengers: Endgame. Now he gets the chance to accentuate those skills alongside Haddish, who established herself as a breakout talent in Girls Trip and Night School. She just starred with Elisabeth Moss and Melissa McCarthy in the Andrea Berloff-directed drama The Kitchen, and teamed with Rose Byrne and Salma Hayek in the Miguel Arteta-directed comedy Limited Partners.
Down Under Cover is being produced by Thematic Entertainment, the production shingle hatched by Hemsworth, John Finemore, James Hoppe and Ben Grayson. Haddish is producing alongside them. She’s repped by UTA and Artists First. Hoare is Brillstein Entertainment Partners. Hemsworth is repped by CAA, Fourward, and Greenburg Glusker.