Movies

Jessica Alba to star in Netflix action movie Trigger Warning

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Published on May 15, 2020 05:34PM EDT

Jessica Alba and Netflix are both heading back to the action genre.

In the wake of the streaming platform's success with films like Extraction and Spenser Confidential, Alba will now star in an original thriller titled Trigger Warning, EW has learned.

Mouly Surya (Marlina the Murderer in Four Acts) will direct the movie, about a traumatized veteran (Alba) who inherits her late grandfather’s bar and faces a moral dilemma as she discovers the truth behind his untimely death. Josh Olson (A History of Violence) and John Brancato (The Game) wrote the screenplay.

Netflix has released a string of large-scale action movies, like 2019's Triple Frontier and Michael Bay's 6 Underground. Extraction, starring Chris Hemsworth, became the studio's biggest film premiere to date with a projected 90 million households watching the title in its first four weeks of being on the platform. (Though there's more than meets the eye with those metrics.)

Jessica Alba — Rosdiana Ciaravolo/Getty Images

Extraction director Sam Hargrave, who's now looking to come back to make the sequel, told EW it's not the kind of movie that typically gets made anymore for theaters. "Back in the '80s, '90s," he explained, "they were making a lot of midrange action movies in, say, the $40-100 million [production budget] range. Nowadays, bigger-budget action movies, unless it’s a franchise or a pre-existing IP, studios don’t really take those risks anymore because it’s hard to recoup their money."

Netflix, he continued, "was willing to put up the money, but it was interesting for us venturing into the future. Where is this going? We shot the movie as if it were going to be put up on [the big] screen but knowing people are going to be ingesting these movies at home."

Trigger Warning feels like a continuation of this level of midbudget action movies on Netflix.

Alba became known for roles in the original Fantastic 4 movies, Sin City, James Cameron's Dark Angel series, as well a slew of rom-coms. Currently, she stars alongside Gabrielle Union in the Spectrum series L.A.'s Finest, a spin-off of the Bad Boys movies. She's also hosting and executive-producing a new docuseries for Disney+, tentatively titled Parenting Without Borders.

Variety was the first to report the news.

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