With ancient Greek tale The Odyssey still slashing its way to peak box office, the sword and sorcery age remains a potent genre for Hollywood.
Now, Paramount Primal, Paramount’s smartly-budgeted genre label formed by producers J.D. Lifshitz and Raphael Margules, has picked up Tower Defense, an original Medieval fantasy from longtime adventure movie scribe Evan Daugherty.
The spec script sale comes with no filmmaker or producer attachments.
Plot details are being kept in the castle keep, but it is being described as a Medieval and supernatural fantasy twist on the concept seen in the early John Carpenter movie Assault on Precinct 13. The 1976 exploitation movie was set in a police station on the eve of the building’s retirement. It told of a group of people, including a police officer and a prisoner, who must survive a brutal gang attack. The movie was inspired by the John Wayne Western Rio Bravo.
The aim is to make the feature R-rated.
Louis Winters is overseeing the project for Paramount Primal.
Daugherty has been involved with some of the bigger franchise movies in the 2010s. He may be best known for writing Snow White and the Huntsman, a spec that brought an action fantasy bent to the well-known fairy tale. Universal made the movie, which starred Kirsten Stewart, Chris Hemsworth and Charlize Theron. It went on to gross nearly $400 million worldwide.
He subsequently wrote the Lionsgate YA movie Divergent, the live-action/CG hybrid Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles for Paramount, and the Tomb Raider reboot that starred Alicia Vikander for MGM and Warner Bros. Collectively, his films have grossed more than $1.5 billion worldwide.
Paramount Primal is been hustling since being established late 2025. It is in production on its first feature, Boys for Life, a comedy that Paramount has dated for April 9, 2027. In July, it acquired an original erotic thriller spec script titled Sweet Spot by screenwriting social media influencer Nic Curcio and his wife Kirby Gladstein. And it made waves in July when it picked up the domestic screen rights to Wes Craven’s original A Nightmare on Elm Street script.
Daugherty is repped by Verve, Alibi Entertainment and McKuin Frankel.
