Idris Elba to star in a survival thriller called Beast which will pit the star against a lion

Idris Elba is about to square off against the king of the jungle.

The Thor star, 48, has signed on to star in the new survival thriller Beast, Deadline  reports. 

The film will see Idris fight to stay alive while being hunted by a fierce lion.

Beast is based on an original idea by Jaime Primak-Sullivan, who also came up with the story idea for 2018’s home invasion thriller Breaking In starring Gabrielle Union. 

Ryan Engle, who wrote the script for the Dwayne Johnson creature feature Rampage, penned this script as well. 

The film will unfold similarly to 2016’s The Shallows, which saw Blake Lively squaring off against a terrifying great white shark near the ocean shore.  

The Universal Pictures film will be directed by Baltasar Kormakur.

Kormakur has helmed other entries in the survival thriller genre – 2015’s Everest, as well as Adrift in 2018, which starred Shailene Woodley and Sam Claflin as a pair stranded on the ocean.

And Elba himself is no stranger to film stories about characters battling nature’s fiercest elements – he starred with Oscar winner Kate Winslet in 2017’s The Mountain Between Us. 

In that movie, Elba and Winslet played two strangers stranded after a horrific plane crash which leads them in snowy wilderness with no help on the way.

Idris, meanwhile, is coming off of last year’s hit Fast & Furious Presents: Hobbs and Shaw, as well as the holiday musical misfire Cats.

He will next be seen in the drama Concrete Cowboy, as well as next year’s The Suicide Squad directed by James Gunn, in which Elba will portray DC comic book supervillain Bloodsport.