NEON Snaps Up U.S. Rights to Finn Wolfhard and Billy Bryk’s Horror Comedy ‘Hell of a Summer’
Award-winning studio NEON announced today that it has picked up the U.S. rights to Hell of a Summer from Finn Wolfhard (Stranger Things, It, Ghostbusters: Afterlife) and Billy Bryk (Friendship, When You Finish Saving the World) from 30WEST. The horror-comedy, directed and written by Wolfhard and Bryk in their feature debut, also stars the duo alongside Fred Hechinger (Thelma, Gladiator 2). The film is set for a 2025 release.
Hell of a Summer, which had its world premiere at the 2023 Toronto International Film Festival, follows 24-year-old camp counselor Jason Hochberg (Hechinger), who arrives at Camp Pineway thinking his biggest problem is that he feels out of touch with his teenage co-workers. What he doesn’t know is that a masked killer is lurking on the campgrounds, brutally picking counselors off one by one.
30WEST fully financed and executive produced the film. Producers are Fred Hechinger, Aggregate Films’ Michael Costigan and Jason Bateman, Drew Brennan, and Parts & Labor’s Jay Van Hoy. The deal was negotiated by Jason Wald on behalf of NEON with 30WEST and CAA Media Finance.
Wolfhard is represented by CAA, Ryan Thomson at Venture Entertainment Partners, Jill Fritzo Public Relations, and Jackoway Austen Tyerman Wertheimer Mandelbaum Morris Bernstein Trattner Auerbach Hynick Jaime LeVine Sample & Klein. Bryk is represented by Daniel Abrams at OAZ and Paul Nelson and Jeremy Berney at Mosaic, Annick Muller at Wolf-Kasteler, and Steve Warren and Jennifer Gray at Hansen Jacobson. Hechinger is represented by WME, Brillstein, Birch Public Relations, and Jackoway Austen Tyerman Wertheimer Mandelbaum Morris Bernstein Trattner Auerbach Hynick Jaime LeVine Sample & Klein.
NEON currently has the sleeper horror hit Longlegs in theaters, starring Maika Monroe and Nicolas Cage, the indie studio’s highest grossing film at the box office, surpassing Bong Joon-ho’s Oscar-winning 2019 hit thriller Parasite. Additional recent and upcoming genre titles include: Cuckoo from Tilman Singer, starring Hunter Schafer and Dan Stevens, which released in theaters on August 9 after a successful festival run at Berlin and SXSW earlier this year; and Immaculate starring Sydney Sweeney, which garnered over $15M at the box office.
Later this year they’ll have Joshua Oppenheimer’s The End, a golden-age musical starring Academy Award-winner Tilda Swinton, which NEON also produced; and Sean Baker’s Anora, which won the Palme d’Or at Cannes after its world premiere earlier this year, will make a fall festival run before its October theatrical release.
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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