The Machinist director Brad Anderson’s sci-fi monster movie World-Breaker has just finished filming, and stars Luke Evans and Milla Jovovich.
Everything was so topsy-turvy during those 2023 SAG-AFTRA strikes that when World-Breaker was announced last October, the production had a cast in place but wasn’t allowed to reveal who was starring. Months later, it’s been announced that Luke Evans and Milla Jovovich are the leads in the sci-fi monster film from director Brad Anderson (The Machinist, TransSiberian).
Filming recently ended in Northern Ireland, and The Hollywood Reporter has the story that Signature Entertainment will distribute the film in the UK and Ireland. The news emerges as the Cannes Film Festival begins in earnest; production company The Exchange is hoping to find buyers for World-Breaker’s international and US rights at the festival’s busy market.
Anderson, whose career is filled with small-to-medium budget genre films, has directed the film from a script by Joshua Rollins and Martin Brennan. Its synopsis, revealed last year, goes something like this:
Five years ago, a tear in the fabric of reality brought creatures to our world from an alternate dimension bent on our destruction. A father hides his daughter on an island to keep her safe while he prepares her for survival and the battles to come. But when the world is about to break, no place is safe.
THR’s more recent description of the plot says that it follows “a father and daughter who must escape a burning city” while humanity fights a war against “vicious creatures from another dimension.”
Evans will play the father, Jovovich the mother who isn’t mentioned in either of the summaries so far, while British actress Billie Boullet (who played Anne Frank in TV’s A Small Light) will play the daughter.
As the film enters post-production, there’s a slight question mark over the title. Deadline billed it as Worldbreaker (all one word) last year; Wikipedia lists it as World Breaker; and THR shoves a hyphen in the middle (World-Breaker). With any luck, the definitive title will be revealed when Signature starts banging the marketing drum in the run up to World-Breaker's release – at present, it sounds as though it’ll be out in 2025.
“World-Breaker is an action-packed high-quality independent proposition that rivals big-budget studio fare, so we pounced on this one!” said Signature boss development manager Katie Wilkinson. “With its very appealing cast, thrilling script and great filmmaker credentials, we are certain UK and Irish audiences will lap it up in 2025.”
More on World-Breaker and its planet-wrecking monsters as we get it.
