Zac Efron Goes Thriller...And Sci Fi...With Two New Projects!!

Merrick here...
Zac Efron is pressing forward with efforts to live down the HIGH SCHOOL MUSICALs with two new films - one's an adaptation of a Brian Michael Bendis graphic novel called FIRE (available HERE), the other represents the merging of two separate projects into a single film.

The plan is for Efron to play a college student who is recruited by the CIA, only to find that he has been trained for a program that creates expendable agents [EDIT] Efron has made a separate deal at Warner Bros to star in a Back To The Future-like film that melds two projects. One’s a pitch from writers Tim Calpin and Kevin Jakubowski, and the other is a WB project called Algorithm that the studio was already developing as a directing vehicle for Nick Stoller, the Forgetting Sarah Marshall director who just wrapped Get Him To The Greek.

...says Deadline HERE. These projects aren't Zac's first move away from musicals (not only was he in HSM, but the HAIRSPRAY film). Efron was recently a lead character in Richard Linklater's ME AND ORSON WELLES, and he's supposedly in place to play Johnny Quest in a live-action version of that series (whatever they end up actually calling it). They'd better hurry with that one, though - he's gonna be getting too old to be a "kid" soon, if he isn't already.
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