It’s officially “Shark Girl Summer.” As if the digital depths weren’t already crowded enough with Netflix’s Thrash and The Asylum’s Shark Thrash, a new contender is swimming into the Cannes market. Kate Beckinsale and Katherine McNamara are officially set to lead the high-stakes survival thriller, White.
Directed by horror veteran Jake West (Evil Aliens) and penned by cult comic creator Dan Schaffer (Dogwitch), the film promises to be more than your average “stay out of the water” cautionary tale.
A Very Bad Day at the Office
The story centers on Willa. She’s a struggling actress who finally gets her big break—only to have it turn into a literal disaster. While traveling overseas for a shoot with a co-star, her private jet goes down in the middle of the Pacific.
As the sole survivor, Willa finds herself stranded on a floating piece of wreckage with nothing but a salvaged satellite phone. When she calls for Help, she doesn’t get a rescue team—she gets her boss. Kate Beckinsale stars as Barbara, a demanding studio executive who apparently treats a plane crash as a minor professional inconvenience and brushes her off.
Instead, the signal is intercepted by Katherine McNamara’s character, a marine biologist who delivers the ultimate “good news/bad news.” Willa has crashed directly into the “White Shark Café,” a real-world stretch of the Pacific where great whites congregate to feed.
The Team Behind the Teeth
Produced by a heavy-hitting team including Yariv Lerner (Rambo: Last Blood), Dominic Burns, and Crawford Anderson-Dillon, WHITE is positioning itself as an “elevated” entry in the genre.
Jake West (Bringing that signature British horror grit) is in the director’s chair for the film written by Dan Schaffer (Expect a sharp, graphic-novel-inspired edge).
Production Notes
While casting for the lead role of Willa is currently underway, principal photography is slated to begin this summer. The production will span Bulgaria, England, and the U.S., ensuring that the “infamous café” looks appropriately terrifying on the big screen.
Highland Film Group CEO Arianne Fraser describes the film as a “ferocious” adventure filled with tension and emotion. With Beckinsale’s history in the Underworld franchise and McNamara’s action pedigree in Shadowhunters and Maze Runner, the film has some serious genre muscle behind it.
Highland’s current slate is looking packed, featuring projects with the likes of Samuel L. Jackson, Eva Green, and Anthony Mackie, but White seems destined to be the “must-watch” of the creature-feature circuit.
A Concern
There may be an issue with the film. There are already two other recent plane-crash/survival movies. The first, “Send Help, just landed on Digital and sees a woman and her boss trapped on an island after their jet goes down. Then there’s the plane-crash shark movie Deep Water. It follows a group of survivors trying to stay afloat after their plane crashes into the waves. The oversaturation of the shark/plane-crash genre could cause a problem. But we’ll have to wait and see.
