Vincent D’Onofrio and Dean Norris are joining Bruce Willis in Eli Roth’s Death Wish reboot
Paramount Pictures and MGM‘s Death Wish reboot is expanding its cast today as Deadline reports that Vincent D’Onofrio (Marvel’s Daredevil) and Dean Norris (Breaking Bad) are both set to star opposite leading man Bruce Willis. Eli Roth (Hostel, Knock Knock) is directing.
Charles Bronson starred in the original 1974 film (in turn based on a 1972 Brian Garfield novel) as Paul Kersey (Paul Benjamin in the novel), a New York man who turns vigilante following the murder of his wife. The original Death Wish received four sequels (all of which starred Bronson) over the course of the next two decades.
Willis is set to play Kersey with D’Onofrio playing Kersey’s brother and Norris playing a character by the name of Detective Rains. Neither character appears in either the original film or the novel.
Although the Death Wish reboot script was previously penned by the likes of Joe Carnahan (The Grey), Dan Gilroy (Nightcrawler) and Graham Yost (Justified), the current draft is attributed to Scott Alexander & Larry Karaszewski (The People v OJ Simpson, Big Eyes, Ed Wood). The script is said to hew closer to author Brian Garfield’s original novel than the 1974 film did. Garfield was famously not a fan of the prior film franchise and worried that the film argued in favor of violent vigilantism.
“The book’s cautionary message is that vigilantism may be a tempting fantasy,” he explains in Paul Talbot’s Bronson’s Loose!: The Making of the Death Wish Films. “but it is a problem, not a solution.”
To clarify his views on the matter, Garfield wrote a literary sequel, Death Sentence. That book, in turn, was loosely adapted into the 2007 James Wan feature of the same name.
What do you think about the Death Wish reboot cast so far? Is there anyone else you’d like to see added to the mix? Let us know in the comments below!
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