DEADLINE – EXCLUSIVE: Netflix has set a killer cast for Spiderhead, landing Chris Hemsworth, Miles Teller and Lovecraft Country breakout Jurnee Smollett to star in the Joseph Kosinski-directed adaptation of the George Saunders short story. Script is by Zombieland and Deadpool scribes Rhett Reese & Paul Wernick.

Kosinski is making this his next film after directing Top Gun: Maverick with Tom Cruise, which boasts Teller as one of its stars.

Spiderhead is set in the near future, when convicts are offered the chance to volunteer as medical subjects in hopes of shortening their sentences. The focus is on two prisoners who become the test patients for emotion-altering drugs that force the prisoners to grapple with their pasts in a facility run by a brilliant visionary who supervises the program.

The film will be produced by Eric Newman for Screen Arcade through the producer’s first-look deal at Netflix, along with Chris Hemsworth; Oren Katzeff and Geneva Wasserman for The New Yorker Studios; Reese & Wernick, Tommy Harper and Jeremy Steckler

Saunders’ short story first ran in The New Yorker and was later collected in his bestselling anthology, Tenth Of December.

Hemsworth just toplined Extraction, the AGBO-produced action film that became Netflix’s most watched feature ever, with a sequel coming. Smollett, who burst on the scene in the latter seasons of Friday Night Lights, most recently co-starred on the big screen in Harley Quinn: Birds Of Prey.

Besides Top Gun: Maverick, Teller’s other credits include Whiplash and Only the Brave.

Hemsworth, Teller, Smollett and Kosinski are all repped by CAA. Hemsworth is also repped by Fourward and Morrissey Management and Smollett is also repped by Management 360 and Del, Shaw, Moonves, Tanaka, Finkelstein & Lezcano. Teller is also repped by Chad Christopher at Goodman, Genow, Schenkman, Smelkinson & Christopher.