Dave Bautista has landed his next lead movie role following his departure from the Marvel Cinematic Universe.
The actor, who played Drax the Destroyer for the last time in Guardians of the Galaxy vol 3, will front the action comedy The Killer's Game.
The plot centres on an assassin named Joe Flood, played by Bautista, who is diagnosed with a terminal illness and decides to order a hit on himself, preferring to be murdered rather than die in protracted pain.
Related: Marvel boss calls Dave Bautista "one of the best actors" in the MCU
However, he then finds out that he doesn't actually have a terminal illness at all, and now has an army of people out to kill him that he now needs to fight off. Deadline reports that Lionsgate has taken the film to the Cannes Film Festival to find buyers this week.
Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings' Sir Ben Kingsley and The Mummy's Sofia Boutella are also starring in the film (via Deadline), but their roles have not been revealed yet.
The Killer's Game has been directed by stunt performer turned stunt co-ordinator turned Day Shift (the 2022 Netflix vampire film starring Jamie Foxx and Snoop Dogg) director JJ Perry.
Related: Marvel star Dave Bautista questions if he's too "unattractive" for rom-coms
Second Chance's Rand Ravich and X-Men: Dark Phoenix's Simon Kinberg wrote the script adapting Jay Bonansinga's novel, while James Coyne has performed some recent rewrites.
Now that's he done with the MCU, would Bautista ever play another comic book role? "I'm open-minded to any role. I'm open-minded to any genre. I'm just open-minded about my career," he told Digital Spy recently.
The Killer's Game is set to start production this summer. Guardians of the Galaxy vol 3 is out in cinemas now.
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Joe Anderton is a freelance news writer and resident Welsh person at Digital Spy, having worked there since 2016.
In his time he's covered a host of live events, interviewed celebrities big and small and crowbarred a countless amount of great/awful (delete as appropriate) puns into articles.
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