Ansel Elgort is set to star in the WarnerMedia series Tokyo Vice helmed by Shang-Chi director Destin Daniel Cretton (Short Term 12, The Glass Castle). The series is based on the non-fiction book Tokyo Vice: An American Reporter on the Police Beat in Japan by American journalist Jake Adelstein – the first non-Japanese reporter working for Yomiuri Shinbun, one of Japan’s biggest newspapers. The book is a first-hand account of Adelstein’s interactions with Tokyo’s criminal underworld as a reporter and was first earmarked for adaptation back in 2013 in a feature film intended to star Daniel Radicliffe as Adelstein, though that project fell by the wayside.
But Adelstein’s book will still be adapted after the Tokyo Vice TV show team received a ten-episode straight-to-series order from WarnerMedia’s streaming service – albeit for the small screen rather than the big screen. Alongside Elgort and Cretton, the show’s talented team also includes award-winning American playwright J.T. Rogers (Oslo, Blood and Gifts) who will script the series. Endeavour Content will serve as the show’s studio while John Lesher, Emily Gerson Saines and Elgort will serve as executive producers.
According to Deadline, Elgort will take on the role of Jake Adelstein in Tokyo Vice which will be the Baby Driver star’s first TV show. Elgort’s other current projects include The Goldfinch – an adaptation of the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel of the same name by writer Donna Tartt directed by John Crowley (True Detective, Brooklyn) in which Elgort will star as a young man who falls into the world of art forgery. Elgort is also set to star in Steven Spielberg’s West Side Story – an adaptation of the classic Broadway musical and a loose remake of the 1961 big screen adaptation which won a whopping 10 Academy Awards. Elgort will play Tony, the co-founder and former member of the all-singing, all-dancing street gang the Jets.
Tokyo Vice is just one of a number of shows ordered by WarnerMedia in an effort to up its programming for its new streaming service which will launch later this year. Other projects currently underway include romantic comedy anthology series Love Life which stars Anna Kendrick and is executive produced by Kendrick and Ghostbusters director Paul Feig and Over My Dead Body – a series version of the podcast of the same name being developed by Brightburn star Elizabeth Banks.
WarnerMedia is also set to develop an animated series of Gremlins based on the classic comedy horror it co-produced with Amblin Entertainment back in 1984. WarnerMedia’s streaming service is set to launch this fall so viewers can expect to see shows including Over My Dead Body, Gremlins and Tokyo Vice some time after that date.
Source: Deadline