Channing Tatum has made no secret of the fact that he’d like to direct sooner rather than later, hinting that he might make his first foray behind the camera on the in-development sequel Magic Mike 2.  However, it looks like he may have found a different, albeit interesting project on which to make his directorial debut instead.  Deadline reports that Tatum and his producing partner Reid Carolin are in talks to produce an adaptation of Jo Nesbø’s crime thriller novel The Son at Warner Bros., with the hopes of possibly taking the helm of the project as well.  Hit the jump for more.

Since stretching his acting chops to surprising success in films like Magic Mike, Side Effects, and 21 Jump Street (and the upcoming drama Foxcatcher), Channing Tatum has been looking to expand his filmmaking horizons.  He already has a few credits under his belt as producer, including the upcoming 22 Jump Street, and he’s been working on a sequel to Magic Mike that he might also direct now that Steven Soderbergh is in “retirement.”  Though the stripper drama follow-up seemed like a fairly logical first step for Tatum as a director, he might be tackling a wholly different genre entirely: crime thriller.

Deadline reports that, while the hope is also for Tatum to star in The Son, it’s very early days on the project.  Tatum and Carolin recently met with Nesbø and producer Kevin McCormick in Oslo, so they appear to be quite serious about the project, and it’ll be interesting to see how things progress from here.  Nesbø’s novel revolves around a young man serving out a prison sentence because he confessed to crimes that others committed.  At the onset of the story’s events, the young man’s father is murdered by men who stage it as a suicide, which spurs him to escape prison and avenge his father’s death.  During his quest, he also rectifies the crimes to which he confessed.

A number of Nesbø’s novels have been acquired by studios for feature film adaptations, including The Snowman with Martin Scorsese and Blood on Snow with Daniel Espinosa and Leonardo DiCaprio, but thus far none have come to fruition.  Could Channing Tatum’s The Son be the first?

Here’s the synopsis for The Son:

The author of the best-selling Harry Hole series now gives us an electrifying stand-alone novel set inside Oslo’s maze of especially venal, high-level corruption.

Sonny Lofthus is a strangely charismatic and complacent young man. Sonny’s been in prison for a dozen years, nearly half his life. The inmates who seek out his uncanny abilities to soothe leave his cell feeling absolved. They don’t know or care that Sonny has a serious heroin habit—or where or how he gets his uninterrupted supply of the drug. Or that he’s serving time for other peoples’ crimes.

Sonny took the first steps toward addiction when his father took his own life rather than face exposure as a corrupt cop. Now Sonny is the seemingly malleable center of a whole infrastructure of corruption: prison staff, police, lawyers, a desperate priest—all of them focused on keeping him high and in jail. And all of them under the thumb of the Twin, Oslo’s crime overlord. As long as Sonny gets his dope, he’s happy to play the criminal and the prison’s in-house savior.

But when he learns a stunning, long-hidden secret concerning his father, he makes a brilliantly executed escape from prison—and from the person he’d let himself become—and begins hunting down those responsible for the crimes against him . . . The darkly looming question is: Who will get to him first—the criminals or the cops? [Amazon]