Guy Ritchie has revealed the start date for his latest project. Speaking at the Red Sea International Film Festival in Saudi Arabia, where he is accepting an honorary award, he revealed that he will begin shooting on the World War II spy thriller The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare in February, alongside Paramount Pictures and Jerry Bruckheimer Films.
Ritchie is a busy man at the moment, taking a few days off from filming the television adaptation of his 2019 film The Gentlemen in London, and also revealing he plans to shoot the live-action adaptation of Hercules for Disney within the next 12 months, having previously successfully adapted Aladdin for the studio.
The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare is said to be inspired by real events and will chart the UK prime minister Winston Churchill and James Bond author Ian Fleming as they start up their secret WWII combat organization. The clandestine brigade's unorthodox fighting methods were believed to introduce new fighting techniques to take on the Nazis, helping to change the course of the war, and the organization was seen as a precursor to the modern-day Black Ops. The group was a close-knit team, where the members knew their risk of dying in battle was high, and that their existence would forever be denied by the government, but they vitally won important victories against the Nazis using a combination of underhanded deception and sheer brute force.
Henry Cavill and Eisa González both signed up to lead the film in October. González is taking on the role of a highly capable military sniper who is said to have extraordinary spycraft abilities, while Cavill is described as the leader of the clandestine organization. González will next be seen in Extrapolations for Apple TV+ and the Netflix sci-fi picture The Three-Body Problem. She was last seen in Michael Bay's action thriller Ambulance earlier this year, as a paramedic who is taken hostage.
Cavill reunites with Ritchie following their work together on 2015's The Man from U.N.C.L.E. He recently announced his departure from the role of Geralt in Netflix's The Witcher, which coincided with his return to the role of Clark Kent/Superman in the DC Extended Universe films, having made a stunning appearance in the recent DC movie Black Adam, where he teased a showdown with the titular character, played by Dwayne Johnson.
Ritchie was first announced as joining the project in February 2021 and will be directing from a script by Arash Amel (A Private War), while The Fighter scribes Paul Tamasy and Eric Johnson penned an earlier draft.