Columbia Pictures has optioned the rights to the non-fiction book Emergency!: This Book Will Save Your Life by Neil Strauss to be developed into a feature film produced by Team Downey, the production company recently set up by Robert Downkey Jr. and his wife. The project is being considered as a possible starring vehicle Robert Downey Jr., with Allan Loeb (Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps) writing the screenplay.
Emergency! traces one man’s story of a dangerous world-and how to stay alive in it or die trying. It is Neil Strauss’s white-knuckled journey through a country that’s lost its sense of safety, as one man equips himself with the tools necessary to save himself and his loved ones from an uncertain future. He sets out to move his life offshore, and in the process, he learns to survive in the wild, and remake himself as a gun-toting, lock-picking, plane-flying, government-defying survivor. It’s a tale of paranoid fantasies and crippling doubts, of shady lawyers and dangerous cult leaders, of billionaire gun nuts and survivalist superheroes, of weirdoes, heroes, and ordinary citizens taking their families off the grid.
Matthew Tolmach said, “Neil Strauss is a tremendous talent and we think Emergency! is his best work yet. It’s a hugely entertaining read that couldn’t be more timely or topical. We think there is a fantastic film in this book and Robert Downey Jr. and Susan Downey, and of course, Mike are the perfect producers to take on the themes of this project.”
However, because it’s early days, there’s no news on when it might go into production.