Will Packer Productions Taps Leon Chills To Adapt Stan Parish’s ‘Love And Theft’ For Universal

Will Packer Productions has tapped screenwriter Leon Chills (Spinning Out, The Wilds) to adapt Stan Parish’s novel Love and Theft for Universal Pictures.

Published by Penguin Random House through their Knopf Doubleday imprint in 2020, Love and Theft is billed as a global romantic heist film set in Las Vegas, Mexico and Spain.

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It centers, per the publisher, on Alex Cassidy and Diane Alison, who develop an instant and undeniable chemistry when they meet at a party in Princeton, New Jersey. She’s a single mother, local fixture and owner of a successful catering company. He’s a single father and weekend homeowner—and leader of an armed-robbery crew that just pulled off a record-breaking, precision jewel heist in Las Vegas. Neither one realizes that their lives have overlapped before, and that the shared history they uncover will threaten everyone they love.

Will Packer and Johanna Byer will produce the film adaptation for Will Packer Productions. Universal Pictures’ Vice President of Production Development, Lexi Barta, is overseeing the project for the studio, with Alvie Hurtado overseeing it for WPP.

Chills has previously written episodes of the Netflix sports drama Spinning Out and Amazon Prime’s YA drama The Wilds, having served as a story editor on the latter. He came upon his first spec sale a couple of years back with Shadow Force, an action drama set up at Lionsgate, with Kerry Washington and Sterling K. Brown attached to star.

Packer founded Will Packer Productions in 2013. Films made by his production company have earned more than $1 billion in total, with 10 opening at No. 1 at the domestic box office, including Girls Trip and Night School, the respective top-grossing comedies of 2018 and 2017. It’s also been behind such titles as The Photograph, Little, What Men Want, No Good Deed, the Ride Along films, Think Like a Man and its sequel Think Like a Man Too, Takers, Obsessed, Breaking In and Stomp the Yard, among others.

Chills is represented by UTA, Heroes and Villains Entertainment, and Jackoway Austen Tyerman; Packer by CAA; Parish by CAA, The Book Group and Heroes and Villains.

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