NEON Charms U.S. Rights to Jeff Nichols’ ‘King Snake’ with Drew Starkey, Margaret Qualley, Michael Shannon
NEON announced today it has acquired U.S. rights to King Snake, from Loving and Mud filmmaker Jeff Nichols.
The film, starring Margaret Qualley (The Substance), Michael Shannon (Take Shelter), and Drew Starkey (Queer), will be produced by Nichols and his Tri-State Pictures partners Brian Kavanaugh-Jones and Sarah Green, in association with Range Media Partners. FilmNation’s Stacey Snider and Glen Basner Executive Produce. FilmNation Entertainment is fully financing the film and handling worldwide sales.
The deal was negotiated by NEON and FilmNation Entertainment in cooperation with Range Media Partners on behalf of the filmmakers. NEON will release the film theatrically in the US nationwide. Principal photography started this month in Arkansas.
A Southern gothic horror, King Snake follows a young couple (Qualley and Starkey) who inherit an Arkansas farm where they face real-world problems and supernatural forces, battling physical and metaphysical demons while confronting the property’s dark legacy.
The news comes just ahead of Cannes, where NEON will arrive with an ambitious slate once again, with no less than six films in competition: James Gray’s Paper Tiger, Arthur Harari’s The Unknown, Cristian Mungiu’s Fjord, Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s All of a Sudden, Hirokazu Koreeda’s Sheep in the Box, and Na Hong-Jin’s Hope. Since 2019, the studio has won the Palme d’Or for six years in a row (not counting the 2021 COVID year the festival was skipped), translating two of them–2019’s Parasite and 2024’s Anora–into Best Picture Oscar wins. In Directors’ Fortnight they have Arie Esiri & Chuko Esiri’s Clarissa, a modern reimagining of Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, and David Greaves’ Sundance sensation Once Upon a Time in Harlem. Rounding out the slate, Nicolas Winding Refn’s Her Private Hell screens out of competition.
This year, NEON received 18 Oscar nominations, the second most for any motion picture studio behind Warner Bros. Joachim Trier’s Sentimental Value and Kleber Mendonca Filho’s The Secret Agent were both nominated for Best Picture, with Sentimental Value ultimately winning the award for Best International Film – bringing the studio’s total to 11 wins.
Recent milestones have included the record-breaking IMAX opening of EPiC: Elvis Presley In Concert and Park Chan-wook’s No Other Choice crossing $10 million domestically. The distributor released Damian McCarthy’s Hokum on May 1 and Boots Riley’s I Love Boosters arrives on May 22.
He is a Rotten Tomatoes-approved critic, accredited by the Cannes Film Festival, Telluride Film Festival, Toronto International Film Festival and more, is a member of the International Cinephile Society (ICS), The Society of LGBTQ Entertainment Critics (GALECA), Critics Choice Association (CCA), San Francisco Bay Area Film Critics Circle (SFBAFCC) and the International Press Academy. Among his many achieved goals with AwardsWatch, he has given a platform to underrepresented writers and critics and supplied them with access to film festivals and the industry and calls the Bay Area his home where he lives with his husband and son.
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