‘Hatton Garden Job’ Beats Other Pics About Famed UK Heist To Production; Voltage Selling Foreign

Ronnie Thompson’s The Hatton Garden Job, about the elderly London thieves who pulled off the biggest burglary in British history, seizing $21M in jewels, is the first of three competing projects about the 2015 heist to go into production. Voltage Picturesis handling foreign sales, while Signature Entertainment will distribute in the U.K. next year. Deadline exclusively reported earlier that The Theory of Everything director James Marsh has a Hatton Garden project based on the Vanity Fair article “The Over the Hill Mob” in the works at Working Title with Joe Penhall writing. In addition, producer Arthur Sarkissian is hatching a project based on the New York Times coverage of the robbery.

Principal photography for The Hatton Garden Job is underway in and around London during the next four weeks. The script by Thompson, Dean Lines and Ray Bogdanovich follows how these tough guys who were nicknamed “the bad grandpas” and the “Enfield Expendables” were recruited by an ex-con and carried out the crime. During a long weekend in April, the group tunneled into a London vault and carried the goods away. Most of the group now are serving time after pleading guilty to conspiracy to burgle with intent — except for one, who got away with $15M. Essentially these guys were nabbed because they were analog criminals in a digital world; they were picked up by closed-circuit cameras and caught using their cell phones before and after the crime. Some six weeks after the burglary, the police raided the homes of the suspects. Goode plays one of the conspirators who got away, and Larry Lamb plays the ringleader.

Ben Jacques (I Am Soldier) is producing The Hatton Garden Job with a cast that also includes Joely Richardson, Stephen Moyer, Clive Russell, Sarah-Jane Crawford, David Calder, Mark Harris and Phil Daniels.