Action movie auteur Michael Bay is backing a new horror from writer-director Josh Lawson titled Shredded, which sounds like a natural successor to last year’s Him. Through his Platinum Dunes banner, which he co-founded alongside Brad Fuller and Andrew Form, Bay continues the trend of producing high-concept creep-a-thons, having previously done so on A Quiet Place and The Purge.
News of his latest producer credit comes from Variety, with Protagonist Pictures, Logical Pictures International, and UTA Independent Film Group also onboard the project. Shredded offers an “unflinching look at the darker side of modern fitness culture and self-obsession,” and follows the newly-single Eileen, who enrolls in but quickly quits a gym class because of its unhinged coach. This pushes him into a kind of bloodthirsty Hulk Mode, abducting Eileen and imprisoning her in a compound where she must endure awful physical workouts. Can she make it out alive?
A statement from Platinum Dunes read:
“Josh has crafted a deeply personal story that brings the horror directly into the audience’s lives. He’s the kind of filmmaker Platinum Dunes is built around — a writer/director with a clear point of view and a sharp instinct for delivering a twisted, crowd-pleasing ride. After Shredded, audiences won’t look at gym equipment — or those wall-length mirrors — the same way again.”
Meanwhile, Protagonist CEO Dave Bishop called Shredded a “bold and timely white-knuckle ride” that directly taps into “contemporary anxieties around control, self-obsession, and self-improvement.”
‘Shredded’ is a Step Up for its Director
Shredded director Lawson has actually plied his trade as an actor for most of his life, beginning in 1997 on an Australian kids show called The Wayne Manifesto. A national rite of passage followed in 2004, when he appeared in the soap Home & Away for three episodes as Felix Walters. Between 2012 and 2016, Lawson filmed 58 episodes of Showtime’s comedy-drama House of Lies, in which he portrayed Doug Guggenheim, while also recurring as Tate Staskiewicz in NBC favorite Superstore and later stopping by Netflix’s Cobra Kai for a one-off episode of this Karate Kid sequel.
Cinematically, he’s shown up in everything from Will Ferrell’s The Campaign and Anchorman 2: The Legend Continues, to animated adventure Free Birds, and video game adaptation Mortal Kombat. The latter has a follow-up coming out this year, and Lawson is set to reprise his Terminator-esque antagonist Kano.
Although he’s directed short films and two feature-length comedies — 2014’s The Little Death and 2021’s Long Story Short — this team-up with Bay’s production company marks a huge swing in his filmmaking trajectory.
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