EXCLUSIVE: In a highly competitive situation, New Regency has landed Fixation, an erotic thriller spec from Wednesday scribes Erika Vazquez & Siena Butterfield, Deadline has learned.
While not much is known about the film’s plot, we’re told it centers on a couple’s therapist who is drawn into a dangerous triangle of lust, lies, and manipulation. Pic will be produced alongside Emmy winner Bruna Papandrea’s Made Up Stories, with Papandrea producing for the company, along with Steve Hutensky, Jeanne Snow, and Claudia Park.
This marks the second collaboration between Papandrea and New Regency, following their partnership on David Fincher’s Academy Award–nominated Gone Girl. It also represents the second collaboration between Papandrea and New Regency’s Nirokhi Raychaudhuri, who previously served as creative executive at Netflix on the thriller Luckiest Girl Alive starring Mila Kunis.
Word of the project comes at a time when the erotic thriller genre has really swung back into relevance, with projects like Fair Play and Babygirl. Other upcoming examples include the M3GAN spin-off SOULM8TE, Gregg Araki’s I Want Your Sex starring Olivia Wilde and Cooper Hoffman, and a Basic Instinct reboot at Amazon MGM Studios, to name just a few.
Meeting as freshman-year roommates at Tufts University, Vazquez and Butterfield have previously written for Netflix’s Wednesday as well as CSI: Vegas. The duo is represented by Gersh, Kaplan/Perrone Entertainment, and Ginsburg Daniels Kallis.
Founded in 2017 by Papandrea and Hutensky, Made Up Stories’ credits include Luckiest Girl Alive; Nine Perfect Strangers, Hulu’s most watched original series upon debut; The Lost Flowers Of Alice Hart, the most successful Australian Amazon Original launch globally; Strife, Binge’s biggest original series launch; The Undoing, HBO’s most watched series of 2020; Anatomy of a Scandal; Pieces of Her; and The Dry, one of the highest-grossing Australian films of all time.
In the past six months, Made Up Stories has launched the second seasons of Nine Perfect Strangers and Strife, in addition to the new series The Last Anniversary. Upcoming, they’re also producing Peacock’s The Good Daughter, in their second collaboration with bestselling author Karin Slaughter.
Recently, New Regency has also acquired “They’re Still Here,” a thriller short story from Stephen Herman, installing Colin Greten as VP of Film and Tesha Crawford as EVP, Head of International Television. Upcoming on the feature side, the studio also has Blood Meridian, based on Pulitzer Prize-winning author Cormac McCarthy’s novel, written by Oscar winner John Logan and directed by John Hillcoat; Watch Dogs, an adaptation of Ubisoft’s best-selling video game franchise starring Tom Blyth and Sophie Wilde; and Psycho Killer, written by Andrew Kevin Walker and starring Georgina Campbell, among other projects.
