Adrift: Jared Leto, Darren Aronofsky & Jason Blum team for all-star ghost ship film

An all-star genre dream team is assembling for a new supernatural feature film called Adrift. According to Deadline, star Jared Leto, director Darren Aronofsky and producer Jason Blum are all attached to the film, which will follow a fishing boat that discovers an abandoned yacht out on the open sea.

When one of the fishing boat's crew members agrees to man the yacht as it's towed back to port, he discovers a log book detailing the fate of the yacht's inhabitants and begins to sense a malevolent presence on board.

The project is an adaptation of a short story by Koji Suzuki, the Japanese author who is best known for the original novel Ring (Ringu) and several sequels, as well as the long list of films that have been spun out of those books and other Suzuki stories like Dark Water.

All three names attached to the film — star, director and producer — are well known in the universe of genre movies.

Leto — whose new movie, the dark serial killer drama The Little Things, premieres Friday (Jan. 29) in theaters and on HBO Max — will star in the title role for Sony's Marvel movie Morbius, which recently had its release date pushed back from this spring to January 2022. Leto will also show up this spring in Zack Snyder's Justice League, reprising his Suicide Squad role as the Joker, and is attached to the long-simmering next movie in the Tron universe. 

Aronofsky, meanwhile, started his directorial career back in 1998 with Pi, an eerie combination of psychological thriller, number theory and Jewish mysticism, and has flirted around the edges of genre ever since. He was attached in the early 2000s to an abandoned film version of Batman: Year One, his 2006 film The Fountain is an underrated sci-fi gem, and his last three movies, Black Swan (2010), Noah (2014) and Mother! (2017) were all horror or fantasy-adjacent.

Adrift will bring Aronofsky and Leto together again for the first time in over 20 years, following 2000's Requiem for a Dream — not a horror movie per se, but a horrifying and quite surreal descent into drug addiction and madness.

Finally, Jason Blum is of course the head honcho of Blumhouse Films, the horror powerhouse behind franchises like Insidious, Sinister, The Purge, Paranormal Activity and many more, along with standalone successes like The Invisible Man. 

It was Leto who apparently found the Suzuki story and pursued the rights for a decade with his producing partner, Emma Ludbrook, eventually landing them and bringing the piece to Aronofsky and Blum. No word yet on when production will start to ramp up, but this is a project to watch.