Yesterday, Deadline reported that Lionsgate is paying $7 million to pre-buy U.S. distribution rights to American Ultra, an action comedy film that begins shooting in New Orleans in five weeks.

Actors Jesse Eisenberg and Kristen Stewart are starring in the film. Eisenberg plays a stoner whose small-town life with his live-in girlfriend (Stewart) is upended when his past catches up with him, putting him the crosshairs of a government operation bent on wiping him out.

“The buzz on this one has been building since Berlin, and I thought a deal might be made there,” wrote Mike Fleming Jr. of Deadline. “This rivals the record $7 million Berlin deal that The Weinstein Company paid for U.S. rights to the Morten Tyldum-directed The Imitation Game, the film that sold based on script and promo reel about WWII war hero Alan Turing, with Benedict Cumberbatch and Keira Knightley starring. The same team at CAA brokered this giant American Ultra deal with Lionsgate after the agency packaged the film and arranged the financing. While many felt that the results of the Berlin market were underwhelming, sometimes those festivals need to be evaluated by results that are not immediately evident. It is becoming more common for dialogue on big films like this one to begin at Berlin. Some of the deals fall in place shortly after, or during the Cannes Film Festival in May. Clearly, studios need to fill slots and haven’t been developing enough, so strong prices should continue to be paid for material and packaged pictures like American Ultra.”

Writer, director and actor Max Landis wrote the script for American Ultra. Landis wrote the screenplays for several films that are currently filming or in pre-production, including Good Time Gang, Mr. Right, Frankenstein and Me Him Her. He also wrote the screenplay and story for the 2012 film Chronicle.

Deadline reported that American Ultra is a co-production between A Likely Story and Circle Of Confusion, with Anthony Bregman, David Alpert and Britton Rizzio producing. Kevin Scott Frakes of Palmstar Media Capital and Raj Brinder Singh of Merced Media Partners are executive producing.

In other film news, a hot spec script titled Winter’s Knight recently created an immediate bidding war among studios such as Warner Bros., Disney, and Universal. Check out the ScreenCraft post about the news here.

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