Sam Mendes signed a two-year first-look deal with Focus Features

Movies June 22, 2009

Academy Award-winning director Sam Mendes’ production company Neal Street Productions, in which he is partnered with Pippa Harris and Caro Newling, has signed a two-year first-look deal with Focus Features. Focus will hold worldwide rights to any features that Neal Street produces. Focus CEO James Schamus made the announcement today.

Mr. Mendes’ new movie Away We Go was released by Focus this month, and last weekend broke into the national boxoffice Top 20 while playing on only 45 screens; its per-screen average of $12,463 is the highest of any film in the Top 20. The picture will open in additional cities and theaters throughout the month. Directed by Mr. Mendes from an original screenplay by Dave Eggers & Vendela Vida, Away We Go stars John Krasinski and Maya Rudolph. Away We Go was produced by Edward Saxon, Marc Turtletaub, and Peter Saraf; Mari Jo Winkler-Ioffreda and Ms. Harris were the film’s executive producers.

Focus president of production John Lyons and senior vice president, international production Teresa Moneo will work on the Neal Street films. Among the projects in development by Neal Street at Focus are:

  • Butcher’s Crossing, an adaptation of the classic 1960 novel written by John Williams and described by The New York Times Book Review as “perhaps the first and best revisionist Western.” Gabe and Alan Polsky of Polsky Films are producing with Neal Street . The epic adventure set in 1870s America follows Will Andrews as he forsakes his Harvard education and lands in the small Kansas town of Butcher’s Crossing, where he is drawn into a sweeping hunt for one of the last great buffalo herds. No screenwriter is yet assigned to the project.

  • Middlemarch, an adaptation of George Eliot’s classic novel of the same name, which explores diverse lives and changing fortunes in a provincial 1830s English community. Screenwriter Andrew Davies has written the current draft.

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