Jude Law has spent the past couple of years deep in prestige territory, playing a dogged FBI agent hunting neo-Nazis, a nightclub owner drowning in debt, and even Vladimir Putin. So it says something that the project his own production company chose to put in the spotlight at this year’s Karlovy Vary Film Festival points him in almost the opposite direction.
Riff Raff Entertainment, the company Law co-founded in 2017, used its festival keynote to unveil an untitled feature built on a premise about as lean as they come, one Law reportedly caught the bug for on his most recent shoot, per Deadline. Co-founder Ben Jackson and head of film and TV Katie Sinclair pitched it as the biggest step up in scale yet for a label that has made its name on elevated, character-first drama and insists on films for cinemas rather than streaming.
The film follows a getaway driver “who wants to get from A to B to C,” with plenty standing in his way, as Jackson described the idea he and Law dreamed up together. The script comes from Zach Baylin, who co-wrote Law’s 2024 crime thriller The Order, a fact-based 1980s manhunt built around armored-car heists. Baylin also co-created Law’s Netflix nightlife thriller Black Rabbit with Kate Susman, the eight-part series that paired him with Jason Bateman. Jackson traced the whole idea back to those The Order car chases, which Law enjoyed enough that the pair started brainstorming a movie around the feeling.
A lean getaway-driver thriller invites obvious comparisons to The Transporter and Drive, and Riff Raff seems happy to lean that way while insisting there is more going on beneath the surface. Sinclair called it a genuine stretch, noting that Law “hasn’t really done action like that before” and casting it as a test of his range as much as the company’s ambitions. She was careful to add that the film stays character-driven and anchored rather than chasing spectacle for its own sake.
Baylin is a reassuring name to have on a script like this. He earned an Oscar nomination for King Richard, wrote Creed III and Neill Blomkamp’s Gran Turismo, and has a grounded UFO thriller in development with director Joseph Kosinski. His work leans toward character-first genre stories, which fit the distinctive, best-in-class version of a genre that Sinclair says Riff Raff goes hunting for.
The specifics, for now, are thin. No director is attached, and no co-stars have been named, with those announcements expected further down the line. Riff Raff is separately developing a new TV series with Baylin, part of a slate that now runs to around 50 projects at various stages. Law, though, is the one driving this particular idea, having helped come up with it in the first place.
