Apple Wins Rights For Will Smith, Antoine Fuqua Slave Film “Emancipation”
Deadline is reporting that Apple Studios has acquired world rights to Emancipation, the film package with Antoine Fuqua directing Will Smith in a Willam N. Collage-scripted action thriller about the harrowing escape of Peter, a runaway slave forced to outwit cold-blooded hunters and the unforgiving swamps of Louisiana on a tortuous journey North where he joined the Union Army.
Sources said the commitment comes in at $105 million net, but when backend gross buyouts are factored in, deal will exceed $120 million when all is said and done.
Pic will be produced by Apple Studios, alongside Smith and his Westbrook Studios, Fuqua and his Fuqua Films, Escape Artists’ Todd Black and Joey McFarland of McFarland Entertainment. James Lassiter and Jon Mone will serve in a producing capacity through Westbrook. Cliff Roberts is exec producer. The concept came from McFarland and he and Roberts enlisted star and filmmaker.
The thriller is based on a true story, fueled by an indelible image; when Peter showed his bare back during an Army medical examination, photos were taken of the scars from a whipping delivered by an overseer on the plantation owned by John and Bridget Lyons that nearly killed him. When the photo known as “the scourged back” was published by the Independent in May, 1863 and then in Harper’s Weekly‘s July 4 issue, it became indisputable proof of the cruelty and barbarity of slavery in America. The photo reached around the world, and legend has it that it made countries like France refuse to buy cotton from the South. It solidified the cause of abolitionists and prompted many free blacks to join the Union Army.
The film will use all that as historical background, but at heart it is an action thriller with a powerful emotional core that involves Peter’s death-defying journey to escape his captors. Using onions to mask his scent from pursuing bloodhounds, and his strength and smarts to survive running barefoot through the swamps for 10 days, the tale takes a turn reminiscent of such survival tales as the Mel Gibson-directed Apocalypto.