New films on Screenbase this week include action-thriller London Has Fallen, Alan Bennett’s motion-pictured memoir The Lady in the Van and Chadwick Boseman’s newest venture Message from the King.

Principal photography has begun on Millennium Films’ and Focus Features’ London Has Fallen, the sequel to 2013’s action-thriller Olympus Has Fallen.

Gerard Butler returns as secret service agent Mike Banning who discovers a plot to assassinate world leaders at the British Prime Minister’s funeral in London. Aaron Eckhart reprises his role as US President Benjamin Asher. Morgan Freeman will also return as Vice President Trumbull.

Babak Najafi (Snabba Cash II) will direct the thriller (the first film was directed by Antoine Fuqua) from a screenplay by Creighton Rothenberger and Katrin Benedikt (Olympus Has Fallen), Christian Gudegast and Chad St. John.

Focus Features will release London Has Fallen on Oct 2, 2015. Producers include Gerard Butler, Alan Siegel, John Thompson, Les Weldon, and Mark Gill. 

Bennett’s memoir

Production continues on the TriStar and BBC Films feature The Lady in the Van, a motion picture adaptation of writer Alan Bennett’s iconic memoir of the relationship between himself and Miss Shepherd, a woman of uncertain origins who ‘temporarily’ parked her van in Bennett’s London driveway and proceeded to live there for 15 years.

The film, directed by long-standing Bennett collaborator Nicholas Hytner, is being filmed on the actual street and in the very house where Bennett lived in Camden Town.

Miles Ketley and Charles Moore are serving as executive producers, alongside Christine Langan of BBC Films. Kevin Loader and Damian Jones produce, along with Hytner.

Sony Pictures has announced that the film will release in cinemas across the UK on Nov 13, 2015.

Chadwick Boseman’s latest

eOne and The Ink Factory are set to co-produce and co-finance director Fabrice Du Welz’s Message from the King. Chadwick Boseman, recently revealed as Marvel’s next superhero in the upcoming Black Panther, will star in the thriller, set in present day Los Angeles.

Boseman will play Jacob King, who arrives in the city from South Africa looking for his younger sister. Within twenty-four hours he has found out that she has been brutally murdered.

Production is expected to begin in Los Angeles in February. Xavier Marchand, president of film production, and Benedict Carver, senior vice president of filmed entertainment, will oversee production for eOne alongside fellow executive producers Ash Shah and Boseman.

The Ink Factory’s Stephen and Simon Cornwell will serve as producers together with Rumble Films’ David Lancaster.

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