Tom Holland to Star in WWII Spy Movie Beneath a Scarlet Sky

Spider-Man: Homecoming proved to be a Marvel box office test that star Tom Holland passed with web-swinging colors, yielding an array of auspicious roles, notably another franchise-starting opportunity as video game hero Nathan Drake in the Uncharted movie adaption. However, the genre of hard drama won’t be neglected, since he’ll headline World War II spy thriller Beneath a Scarlet Sky.

According to Deadline, Spider-Man star Tom Holland reteams with former Sony Pictures boss Amy Pascal through her Pascal Pictures company to star in Beneath a Scarlet Sky, based on the 2017 fact-based novel of the same name by Mark Sullivan. While still without a director or screenwriter, producers Pascal and Rachel O’Connor are doing early work on the adaptation, having just acquired the film rights to Mark Sullivan’s novel, which was just released on May 1.

Holland headlines Beneath a Scarlet Sky as Pino Lella, an Italian teenager who’s simply going about his life under the specter of the World War II; a conflagration into which his country was thrown due to fascist leader Mussolini’s alliance with Nazi Germany. That is, until the war claims his family’s home and word of the Nazi atrocities incites Pino to join an underground railroad to help Jews escape over the Alps. However, with his conscription number soon likely to be called, Pino’s parents enlist him as a German soldier, hoping to keep him out of combat. Yet, Pino, at age 18, gets injured, anyway. The fateful occurrence sends him to another assignment as the personal driver of Adolph Hitler himself; a fortuitous position for his clandestine Resistance endeavors, since it makes him the proverbial fly… err, spider on the wall who listens to the elite of the Axis powers.

The story itself was the product of investigative journalism from Sullivan – a former Peace Corps volunteer in Africa – that dramatizes the personal account of the real-life Pino Lella, who recently turned 91 years old and lives Milan.

Of course, before Tom Holland uses his intuition to spy on Nazis in Beneath a Scarlet Sky (which might just evoke a “Scarlet Spider” joke or two from Marvel fans), he’ll first utilize his Spidey senses again as Marvel’s Wall-Crawler, joining an array of Marvel heroes in 2018’s Avengers: Infinity War, its untitled 2019 megamovie follow-up and just a few months later, the untitled Spider-Man: Homecoming sequel. He’ll next be seen opposite Benedict Cumberbatch and Michael Shannon in the historical electricity drama The Current War, which arrives on December 22, 2017.

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