Mike Fleming

EXCLUSIVE: Fox International Productions is rebooting Hitman, the live action film adaptation of the hit Square Enix video game. They’ve set The Fast And The Furious‘s Paul Walker to star in Agent 47, an action film that was written by A Good Day To Die Hard‘s Skip Woods and Michael Finch and will be directed by Aleksander Bach, a highly regarded commercials director making his feature helming debut.

This gives a new start to Hitman, which was turned into a 2007 film that starred Timothy Olyphant as the genetically engineered elite assassin with the barcode tattooed on the back of his head. Woods wrote that movie, which wasn’t a rave with the critics, but grossed $100 million worldwide. The new film, with Walker playing the lethal protagonist, will shoot in Berlin and Singapore this summer after Walker completes a global press tour for Fast And Furious 6. Walker will shave his head and make this his first big film after Fast 6, whose trailer has been generating 20,000 tweets an hour since it debuted during Sunday’s Super Bowl. Production on the film begins in June.

FIP, led by Sanford Panitch, sees this as a potential gold mine both in the U.S. but especially in the overseas marketplace, where the video game has moved over 20 million units and where Walker has done very well with Universal’s race car franchise and films like Eight Below. Agent 47 will be produced by Chuck Gordon, Alex Young, and Adrian Askarieh. Daniel Alter will be exec producer. 20th Century Fox will distribute in the US and worldwide.

UTA and Luber Roklin Entertainment rep Walker. Finch and Bach are repped by Verve.