Snake thrillers are having an unexpected comeback at the box office. Sony’s meta-reboot of Anaconda, starring Jack Black and Paul Rudd, opened on Christmas Day 2025 and went on to gross $135 million worldwide against a $45-million budget. This proves there’s still an audience willing to pay for reptilian mayhem nearly three decades after Jennifer Lopez first fled through the Amazon.
That recent film played its premise for laughs, though, and the natural question was whether anyone would try the concept seriously. It turns out a rival studio has been quietly building exactly that kind of movie, and it just hired a director with a long track record of making pulpy material work.
According to Deadline, Julius Avery has signed on to direct Crush, the python survival thriller that 20th Century Studios won in a competitive bidding process last year. The film is described as following “a woman hiking alone in the Everglades who wakes to find herself trapped in the crushing coils of a massive python, fighting to stay alive as every breath brings her closer to death.”
The story is reportedly inspired by true events and will unfold largely in real-time, which places it in the lineage of contained survival thrillers like 127 Hours, Fall, and Crawl. Avery made his feature debut with the crime thriller Son of a Gun, one of A24’s earlier releases, before moving into studio work with Overlord and The Pope’s Exorcist. The J.J. Abrams-produced World War II action-sci-fi Overlord remains his most admired film, though it performed modestly at the box office.
The Pope’s Exorcist went the other way, grossing $77 million worldwide and later finding another wave of attention on Netflix. It spent nine straight days as the top film in the U.S., which is exactly the kind of theatrical-plus-streaming performance profile a mid-budget thriller like Crush would presumably hope to replicate.
The Script’s Origin Story Is Almost as Good as The Movie’s Premise
Crush arrives with one of the more charming development backstories in recent memory. The screenplay was written by John Fischer, an executive at Temple Hill Entertainment, the company behind franchises such as Twilight and Smile. Fischer reportedly wrote the script on spec in his spare time and posted it to the Black List under the pseudonym J.W. Archer.
Once the script started drawing attention, he had to tell his bosses what he had been working on. Temple Hill founders Marty Bowen and Wyck Godfrey, who are now producing the film, previously described with Deadline that conversation with obvious affection:
“We went from being terrified about how to come up with nice things to say when he asked us to read it to elated that it was a thrill ride of a movie that we wanted to produce. We can’t wait to abuse him with pages and pages of notes as we move this into production.”
It’s fair to be skeptical of a movie whose entire pitch is one woman versus one snake. Premises this narrow rise or fall on execution, and plenty of contained thrillers run out of steam before the ending. Still, there are reasons this one could work.
A real-time structure can help keep the story moving. And the Everglades setting draws on something real, given how well-documented Florida’s invasive Burmese python problem is. For now, the key update is that the project has moved forward in a meaningful way.
This story originally appeared on Movieweb
