Mike Fleming

EXCLUSIVE: JOBS, the film that will star Ashton Kutcher as Apple genius Steve Jobs, will be sold at the Cannes Film Festival by Inferno. The film will be directed by Joshua Michael Stern based on a Matt Whiteley script. Production is slated to begin later this year. Five Star Institute’s Mark Hulme is financing and will produce a film that covers Jobs’ life from his twenties to mid-thirties. CAA will be selling domestic distribution rights on the picture and packaged the project.

Inferno has a hot hand coming into Cannes, with a slate that includes Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio, the Olivier Dahan-directed Grace of Monaco that will star Nicole Kidman, and Maggie, the elevated genre film about the John Scott 3-penned spec script about the six-week metamorphosis of a 16-year-old teenage girl into a zombie.

“There is a lot of product out there and some buyers have said it’s more than they’ve seen in 30 years,” said Inferno’s Bill Johnson. “There are a lot of programmer type projects, but we feel pretty fortunate in that we feel we’ve got films that are standing out from the crowd.”