Tom Hardy and Channing Tatum have been cast in a film about the US withdrawal and subsequent evacuation of Afghanistan, which took place three months ago. Universal Pictures have acquired an original pitch from writer George Nolfi, based on recently reported true stories.
According to Deadline, the story will focus on three former special forces team members who jump back into the fray alongside their Afghan counterparts, to rescue families and allies left behind amid the rapid fall of Afghanistan in August 2021.
Hardy and Tatum will be producers of the film, alongside Jules Daly. This will be something of a change of direction for Hardy, who recently starred in the anti-hero blockbuster Venom: Let There Be Carnage. Channing Tatum has not starred in a live-action feature film since 2017, when he appeared in Kingsman: The Golden Circle and Steven Soderbergh’s heist comedy Logan Lucky, alongside Daniel Craig and Adam Driver.
Both actors do have several upcoming projects, however. Tatum has Dog, which he co-directed, coming in 2022. Also next year, he is starring in Lost City of D – a Romancing the Stone-style adventure, opposite Sandra Bullock.
Hardy will be starring in action-thriller Havoc, directed by Gareth Evans (The Raid, Gangs of London) for Netflix in 2022. He has also been cast as polar explorer Ernest Shackleton in a presumed-biopic.
Films based on very recent news events tend to come under tremendous scrutiny and are rarely well-received. Examples include Jay Roach’s Bombshell, which was released in 2019 and is based on events from 2016. She Said – the book about how the Harvey Weinstein scandal broke – is being turned into a similarly-themed film as well.
There have been two movies made about the Boston marathon bombing in 2013 – Stronger (2017) starring Jake Gyllenhaal and Patriots Day (2016) starring Mark Wahlberg. Mark Wahlberg also starred in Deepwater Horizon in 2016, about the oil spill in the gulf of Mexico in 2010.
Tom Hardy’s very first movie role was in Ridley Scott’s Black Hawk Down released in 2001, about a 1993 US military raid in Mogadishu that goes wrong. While it will take a while for the script for this Afghanistan movie to be written and for filming to begin, it will still be a very recent event by the time its released. We will have to wait and see how this pans out for Hardy and Tatum.