While Netflix's spend-happy ways have helped them consolidate their power base quickly, the other reason is that filmmakers are flocking to them in droves. Lured in by the creative freedom and a sure distribution system, we've seen numerous high-profile directors find a home under the Netflix umbrella. Hello, they've got Martin Scorsese's The Irishman! Well now you can count one more major Hollywood director and it's Fast & Furious director, Justin Lin.
Lin, who directed four of the Fast and the Furious movies, will get behind the camera for The Stand Off, a film about the intense, racially-charged 1969 standoff between the LAPD's newly-formed SWAT unit and the Black Panthers. Mark Heyman (Black Swan) wrote the script which will tell the story from both sides' perspective. If you don't know the story, it's an interesting one that still divides people in L.A. today. It was SWAT's first real deployment and their task was to raid the Black Panther's headquarters, which was located in a densely-populated area of L.A. The violent four-hour standoff saw a phone call made to the Department of Defense so SWAT could employ the use of a friggin' grenade launcher.
Lin apparently can't get enough of this type of thing. He's also developing a SWAT TV series with Shawn Ryan that has been picked up by CBS. [Deadline]
