Annual Top Films Lists

Top 50 Most Anticipated American Independent Films of 2019: #49. Glenn Ficarra & John Requa’s King of the Jungle

Published on January 22, 2019

King of the Jungle

Being packaged since 2017 (initially, Johnny Depp was top billing), filmmaker tandem Glenn Ficarra & John Requa currently have a lot of items on the docket but King of the Jungle (the salacious true life tale about the dude who gave PC computers a fighting chance against virus with funky names) could begin lensing shortly if the stars align. Featuring Seth Rogen and Michael Keaton canvassing the Belize backdrop, we’re unclear as to the scope of the production (low end would be the 15M range), but Ficarra & Requa who last gave us the underwhelming Whiskey Tango Foxtrot in 2016 (review) could work with a budget size somewhere in-between their underrated Directors’ Fortnight 2009 entry, I Love You Phillip Morris and their follow-up studio items in 2011’s Crazy, Stupid, Love (trailer) and 2015’s Focus (trailer).

Gist: Written by Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski (Big Eyes), this is based on Joshua Davis’ Wired magazine article “John McAfee’s Last Stand,” the pic will tell the story of how McAfee (Keaton), creator of the McAfee Antivirus software, cashed in his fortune, left civilization and moved to the jungle in Belize. There, he set up a Colonel Kurtz-like compound of guns, sex and madness. In the film, Wired magazine investigator Ari Furman (Rogen) accepts what he thinks is a run-of-the-mill assignment to interview McAfee, but once he arrives in Belize, he finds himself pulled into McAfee’s escalating paranoia, slippery reality and murder.

Release Date/Prediction: More likely a 2020 offering, production would have to begin within the next couple of months for what would be a TIFF or AFI Film Fest entry. Rights were being made available at AFM last November.

Eric Lavallée

Eric Lavallée is the founder, CEO, editor-in-chief, film journalist and critic at IONCINEMA.com (founded in 2000). Eric is a regular at Sundance, Cannes and TIFF. He has a BFA in Film Studies at the Mel Hoppenheim School of Cinema. In 2013 he served as a Narrative Competition Jury Member at the SXSW Film Festival. He was an associate producer on Mark Jackson's This Teacher (2018 LA Film Festival, 2018 BFI London). In 2022 he served as a New Flesh Comp for Best First Feature at the 2022 Fantasia Intl. Film Festival. Current top films for 2022 include Tár (Todd Field), All That Breathes (Shaunak Sen), Aftersun (Charlotte Wells).