James Mangold is having one of those career moments most directors spend a career dreaming about. Coming off the success of Logan, which is a bonafide critical and commercial hit, topping $400 million worldwide in half a month, Mangold is probably fielding a lot of offers right now, but the director has chosen to return to 20th Century Fox for his next film, an adaptation of Don Winslow's The Force.

Per Deadline, the 3:10 to Yuma and Walk the Line helmer is in talks to develop and direct an adaptation of the upcoming NYPD epic from the writer of the critically-acclaimed best-selling novel The Cartel. The Force follows a corrupt cop caught in the web of his misdeeds and was picked up by the studio last fall in a seven-figure deal before the novel even had a title. Ahead of its release, the book has already got plenty of buzz around it, including some major praise from none other than Stephen King, who called it "The Godfather, only with cops," adding, "It’s that good." The book will be published on June 20th.

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Scott Free’s Ridley Scott, The Story Factory’s Shane Salerno, and Michael Schaefer are producing. The team is looking to find a writer quickly, who will develop the film with Mangold.

Here's the official book synopsis via Harper Collins:

All Denny Malone wants is to be a good cop.

 

He is “the King of Manhattan North,” a, highly decorated NYPD detective sergeant and the real leader of “Da Force.” Malone and his crew are the smartest, the toughest, the quickest, the bravest, and the baddest, an elite special unit given unrestricted authority to wage war on gangs, drugs and guns. Every day and every night for the eighteen years he’s spent on the Job, Malone has served on the front lines, witnessing the hurt, the dead, the victims, the perps. He’s done whatever it takes to serve and protect in a city built by ambition and corruption, where no one is clean—including Malone himself.

What only a few know is that Denny Malone is dirty: he and his partners have stolen millions of dollars in drugs and cash in the wake of the biggest heroin bust in the city’s history. Now Malone is caught in a trap and being squeezed by the Feds, and he must walk the thin line between betraying his brothers and partners, the Job, his family, and the woman he loves, trying to survive, body and soul, while the city teeters on the brink of a racial conflagration that could destroy them all.

 

Based on years of research inside the NYPD, this is the great cop novel of our time and a book only Don Winslow could write: a haunting and heartbreaking story of greed and violence, inequality and race, crime and injustice, retribution and redemption that reveals the seemingly insurmountable tensions between the police and the diverse citizens they serve. A searing portrait of a city and a courageous, heroic, and deeply flawed man who stands at the edge of its abyss, The Force is a masterpiece of urban living full of shocking and surprising twists, leavened by flashes of dark humor, a morally complex and utterly riveting dissection of modern American society and the controversial issues confronting and dividing us today.

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Image via 20th Century Fox