Toronto: The Orchard Buys Jesse Eisenberg Drama ‘Hummingbird Project’

By Brent Lang

LOS ANGELES (Variety.com) – The Orchard has bought “The Hummingbird Project,” a drama about two scheming cousins that stars Jesse Eisenberg and Alexander Skarsgard, Variety has confirmed. The deal is for U.S. rights.

“The Hummingbird Project” premiered at this year’s Toronto International Film Festival and attracted some attention from studios because of its cast and subject matter. The film finds Eisenberg and Skarsgard (unrecognizable with a shaved head) attempting to build a thousand-mile-long tunnel from Kansas to New Jersey that will give them a one-millisecond edge on stock transactions. Kim Nguyen (“War Witch”) directs.

The Orchard plans to release the film in 2019. The indie studio’s upcoming releases include two foreign language film awards contenders, “Birds of Passage” and “El Angel,” as well as the comedy “The Unicorn.”

It has been a relatively slow market at this year’s Toronto. Neon, another indie studio, has been active, buying “Vox Lux” and “Wild Rose,” and Sony Pictures Classics nabbed “Maiden,” a buzzy documentary, but Amazon and Netflix, two big buyers, haven’t opened their wallets. Instead, much of the heat has been on Oscar contenders such as “Roma” and “A Star is Born,” that rolled into town with distribution firmly in place.

CAA brokered the deal for “The Hummingbird Project.”