EXCLUSIVE: In a strong year-end book deal, Apple Studios has paid near 7-figures for the Elliot Ackerman novel Sheepdogs for Playtone partners Tom Hanks and Gary Goetzman to develop into a series. The book will be published summer of 2025 by Alfred K. Knopf/Penguin Random House.
Ackerman is a former Marine Corps special operations team leader whose books include Halcyon, Green On Blue and Waiting for Eden, and he cowrote with Admiral James Stavridis 2034 and 2054.
Hanks and Goetzman’s Playtone are coming off the acclaimed WWII series Masters of the Air, and they are gearing up for a sequel to Greyhound, with Hanks once again starring in the script he’s written and Aaron Schneider directing. The first film was based on The Good Shepherd by C.S. Forester.
Sheepdogs revolves around Skwerl and Cheese, two elite paramilitary soldiers down on their luck. Skwerl is an ex-Marine who used to work for the CIA’s elite paramilitary wing, fired after a raid went bad in Afghanistan. Big Cheese Aziz is a legendary pilot, but the fall of Kabul has left him working the nightshift at a gas station. Skwerl recruits Cheese into an anonymous network of so-called sheepdogs, who operate in the shadowy space between predator and prey. Their mission, which Skwerl convinces a reluctant Cheese to accept, is to repossess a private jet stranded on a remote African airfield. Their fee: a commission on the jet’s $5 million value. But nothing about the job adds up. Their contact goes missing. Their handler is as mysterious as the real source of the money. And when the women in their lives get involved—one pregnant wife and one a dominatrix—the stakes skyrocket.
As things go awry, they join forces with an eccentric bomb technician turned off-the-grid survivalist, a lapsed Amish adventurer, a used car dealer elected to Congress, and a case officer known as the White Russian. Together they take a wild ride through the underbelly of modern war and intelligence, hopefully headed for redemption.
CAA brokered the deal for Janklow & Nesbit.
