THUNDER RUN Is A Go. Financing In Place - Shooting Starts This Summer!

I'm thrilled at how fast this project is coming together since we heard about the cast that's attached to THUNDER RUN. Sam Worthington, Gerard Butler and Matthew McConaughy top line this HUGE action film that will use extremely heavy visual effects to capture what to date has been called impossible to achieve with standard live action. In fact most of this thing will be motion and performance captured with voices added, that's how crazy it is. It would have been prohibitively expensive to shoot it with real tanks.

THUNDER RUN is based on the David Zucchino novel entitled THUNDER RUN: THE ARMORED STRIKE TO CAPTURE BAGHDAD. Simon West (THE EXPENDABLES 2, THE MECHANIC, CON AIR) is directing and fully embracing modern 3D technology too.

Here's the book's description: 
In one of the boldest gambles in modern military history, just three battalions and fewer than a thousand men launched a violent thrust of tanks and Bradley Fighting Vehicles into the heart of a city of 5 million people and, in three bloody days of combat, ended the Iraqi war. Thunder Run is the story of the surprise assault on Baghdad—one of the most decisive battles in American combat history—by the Spartan Brigade, the Second Brigade of the Third Infantry Division (Mechanized). 

Facing Iraqi forces dug into bunkers and firing from rooftops, the brigade punched a hole through the heart of Baghdad with a high-speed charge to Saddam Hussein’s presidential palace and military parade grounds. Many Iraqi soldiers fled or surrendered during the onslaught, but thousands of Republican Guards, Fedayeen militiamen, and Arab mercenaries stood and fought, challenging seventy-ton Abrams tanks in Toyota pickup trucks, school buses, taxicabs, Chevrolet Caprices, ambulances, and garbage trucks.

Iraqi forces destroyed the brigade’s command center, cutting off communications and burning a fleet of signal vehicles. The Iraqis also ambushed the brigade’s resupply column, killing two sergeants and setting fuel and ammunition tankers ablaze in an attack that nearly cut off the main assault column. And even as it appeared that the brigade was seizing control of the capital on the battle’s third day, a fierce counterattack across the Tigris River trapped an American tank company under withering fire and forced a retreat. With the shadow of Mogadishu hanging over every member of the Spartan Brigade, the capture of Baghdad was a brutal and terrifying three days of urban warfare.

Trust me, this movie is going to be MASSIVE. Shooting starts this summer.

For all of our THUNDER RUN coverage, click here. More when I get it!

via Collider