Now there’s a pairing: Jeremy Renner and Marvel’s Josh Brolin are making a thriller

Sometimes Hollywood tries to "inspire" us with stories that lean a bit melodramatic, but this one—A Speck in the Sea—genuinely sounds mad, in the best possible way. Two actors most people recognise from the MCU—Jeremy Renner and Josh Brolin—are teaming up again, but this time they're not battling intergalactic tyrants or firing arrows at robots. Instead, they're starring in a gritty survival thriller based on the true tale of a lobster fisherman who got flung into the Atlantic in the dead of night and somehow managed to stay alive long enough for someone to notice. It's being put together by an actual Oscar-winning director, and the whole thing just screams "Why has no one made this sooner?".

A Speck in the Sea is being led by Oscar winner Orlando von Einsiedel, with a script from Oscar-nominated Jeff Pope.

The real deal: Men overboard

Bit of backstory: Josh Brolin is playing Johnny Aldridge, a Montauk fisherman who fell off his boat into the open sea—pitch black, freezing water—in 2013. The kicker is, while Aldridge was struggling not to drown, his mate Anthony Sosinski (played by Jeremy Renner) was dead asleep below deck. Standard night at sea turned into "find my friend in the bloody Atlantic"—and the rescue mission ballooned into a huge operation, roping in emergency teams across multiple states. Not your average fishing trip.

Renner and Brolin are finally sharing the screen, but not as superheroes.

Two studios—193 and Rideback—are the main players behind the film, with Mark Bauch and Jonathan Eirich handling the producing side. 193 will flog it internationally at AFM, which is usually the marker that they're expecting people to want to buy big on this one. Meanwhile, CAA Media Finance and WME Independent will fight over who gets the North American rights, as per usual.

Filmmakers and who’s who

• Orlando von Einsiedel: won an Oscar for The White Helmets (short doc), also nominated for Virunga.
• Jeff Pope: Oscar nomination for writing Philomena (the Judi Dench & Steve Coogan film).
• Patrick Wachsberger (193): running the business end.
• Mark Bauch (One Day’s Walk): producing, obvious passion project vibe.
• Jonathan Eirich (Rideback): producing as well; been chasing “true survival” stories for a while.

Everyone involved keeps using words like “grit”, “humanity”, and “humour” to describe the film, and they're not wrong about the ‘unbelievable’ part—plenty of stories claim it, but if the script sticks to what actually happened, this probably deserves it. No spandex in sight: just two blokes, a boat, and the Atlantic Ocean doing its best to kill someone.

Renner steps into the role of Sosinski, the bloke who slept through his friend's leap, then sparked the rescue. Brolin is the poor sod in the water.

So that’s the set-up: A Speck in the Sea brings proper movie pedigree—Oscar winners, Marvel leads, true stories that are genuinely hard to believe. Sales and distribution are being sorted, but there’s every chance this will be in cinemas before you’ve defrosted your fish fingers.