.png){kind=logo}
EXCLUSIVE: Joe Russo and Chris LaMont have secured the rights to a viral short story from Holly Riordan and adapted a screenplay from it titled When a Stranger Venmos, with Frank and Ivanna Borin attaching to direct, and Matt Smith and Dan Gedman boarding to produce via Highway 10.
Published on the website Thought Catalog in 2022, the story from Riordan is titled “A Complete Stranger Sent Me 10k On Venmo — But There Was A Catch.” In the film, an assistant struggling to survive in Los Angeles is thrown a lifeline when a complete stranger offers her increasingly large sums of money to do stranger and stranger challenges. She must then decide just how far she’s willing to go to pay her bills.
“We’ve been obsessed with When a Stranger Venmos from the moment we read it,” said Frank and Ivanna Borin. “We were pulled in by how this horror thriller takes the anxiety of modern-day survival in today’s America and turns it into something sharp, fast, and terrifying. It’s the kind of story that speaks directly to what young people are feeling right now and that’s the secret weapon of the genre.”
Producers Smith and Gedman said, “Russo and LaMont’s fast-paced thriller immediately excited us with its compelling mystery, franchisable villain, and most importantly the culturally relevant questions it was asking of what Gen Z is both forced and willing to do to get ahead in the modern world. We have long wanted to work with Frank and Ivanna Borin. Their style, sensibility and connectivity to youth culture make them the perfect directors for this project.”
Based on Long Island, Riordan is a thriller author who spent eight years as a senior staff writer at Thought Catalog, bringing hundreds of millions of views to the site, which has been a pioneer in digital media since 2010, reaching over 60M monthly readers across its network. She has over 90K followers across platforms and has written books like thriller The Guilty Twin, as well as Forget Her, a work of science fiction. She is repped by Helen Heller at the Helen Heller Agency.
Not to be confused with the Joe Russo of Avengers fame, When a Stranger Venmos‘ Russo just sold Portrait of God, a horror spec he wrote with filmmaker Dylan Clark (not the producer of The Batman films), to Universal Pictures, and will produce the pic alongside Jordan Peele and Sam Raimi, as we first reported. As three-time Blood List screenwriters, Russo & LaMont’s feature credits include the Peyton List and Bob Gunton-starring horror film The Inheritance, the Bruce Willis-starring Hard Kill, the Ryan Phillippe, Ving Rhames and Kate Bosworth-starring The Locksmith, the Neal McDonough-starring Soul Mates, and the thriller The Au Pair Nightmare, which Russo directed.
As a producer, Russo’s feature credits include the Mickey Rourke-starring horror anthology Nightmare Cinema and the Zac Efron and Russell Crowe-starring The Greatest Beer Run Ever. In the podcast space, he produced seven seasons of the award-winning horror series Post Mortem with Mick Garris, featuring over 100 in-depth conversations with genre legends like Stephen King, Quentin Tarantino, John Carpenter, Guillermo del Toro, James Wan, Edgar Wright and more. Russo and LaMont are represented by Untitled, Fictional Entity, and Yorn Levine.
Frank and Ivanna Borin are a husband-and-wife directing team who founded UnderWonder Content, a leading production company in the music video and commercial space. They’ve directed major projects for Lil Nas X, Jack Harlow, Zayn Malik, 5 Seconds of Summer, Tyga, and A$AP Ferg, their most recent ad campaign being for the game Raid: Shadow Legends starring Jeff Goldblum. As executive producers, they’ve been the creative force behind videos for Dua Lipa, Jennifer Lopez, Cardi B, Kanye West, Harry Styles, Doja Cat, Post Malone, The Weeknd, Sam Smith, Machine Gun Kelly, and many others.
Founded by veteran film producer Matt Smith (Maleficent, Valley Girl) and award-winning commercial and music video director/producer Dan Gedman, Highway 10 is currently in post on the darkly comedic thriller The Saviors, starring Adam Scott and Danielle Deadwyler, as well as the romantic comedy Wishful Thinking, starring Lewis Pullman and Maya Hawke.
English (US) ·