Coming hot off the heels of his first acting Oscar in February, Brad Pitt is set to star in Bullet Train for Sony Pictures. David Leitch (John Wick, Deadpool 2, Fast & Furious Presents: Hobbs & Shaw) will direct the assassin action thriller and supervise the script, written by Zak Olkewicz.

The film is based on Maria Beetle, a Japanese novel by best-selling author Kotaro Isaka, where five assassins on different missions find themselves on a speeding bullet train from Tokyo to Morioka. It is discovered that their missions might be related to one another, and the readers are taken on a thrilling journey to find out why, what awaits the assassins at the terminal station and who will make it off the train alive. 

Publishing company Harvill Secker has also separately announced that it will publish an English version of the novel Bullet Train next year.

Bullet Train will be produced by Leitch and Kelly McCormick (Atomic Blonde) through their company 87North along with Antoine Fuqua and Fuqua Films’ Kat Samick. For Sony Pictures, Brittany Morrissey is the executive overseeing the project.

After his Oscar-win for Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood for his role as stuntman Cliff Booth, Pitt is set to work on Paramount and Damien Chazelle’s Babylon alongside co-star Emma Stone. However, with production moving to 2021, the actor has been eyeing several projects to fit into his schedule before then, eventually landing on Bullet Train.