'Stay Frosty': Idris Elba To Star In Action Movie From 'Extraction' Director

Idris Elba is continuing his push into action movie territory.

The Luther, The Wire, and Marvel Cinematic Universe veteran is leading the ensemble of James Gunn's explosive action film The Suicide Squad later this year, and now Elba is also set to star in a new action film called Stay Frosty, which hails from Extraction director Sam Hargrave.

Deadline reports that Warner Bros. has won a "wild spec auction" for the rights to Stay Frosty, shelling out more than a million dollars against low seven figures in the hopes that the project gets made. Here's the pitch: "After miraculously surviving a bullet to the head, a man has to figure out who wants him dead and why. He needs to stop the assassin while still making it back home in time to spend Christmas with his son."

This is just one or two degrees away from "What if Crank protagonist Chev Chelios was a family man?", which sounds like a hell of a good time at the movies to me. (And speaking of the Crank movies, while I really like Jason Statham's work in that franchise, I think Elba could have been a great Chelios himself had the producers gone in a different direction.) But yeah, toss a determined, righteously motivated, and pissed-off Elba in a Christmas action movie setting, and I'm absolutely interested in seeing the shit hit the fan as he tries to get home to his family.

Tyler Marceca wrote the script. If you don't recognize that name, you're not alone: he hasn't written anything that's been produced yet, but he did write a script for another action movie called The Disciple Program which was purchased by Universal way back in 2012. At the time, Mark Wahlberg was lined up to star in that project for The Imitation Game director Morton Tyldum, but it never materialized and we haven't heard anything about it since. So Marceca is a blank slate to us.

Hargrave is on board to direct Stay Frosty, which is a fun but silly title – I hope Elba utters it as a Schwarzenegger-inspired punch line just after dispatching with the villain. He worked as a stunt man, stunt coordinator, and second unit director on several major action films of the past 15 years before launching onto every studio's radar with Extraction, his feature directorial debut which evidently did great viewership numbers for Netflix. An Extraction sequel is reportedly in development, so we'll have to see which of these movies makes it to the starting line first.