Lionsgate Premiere, the studio’s specialty arm, will release “The Gates,” a thriller starring Mason Gooding, Algee Smith, Keith Powers and James Van Der Beek, in select theaters on Mar. 13, TheWrap has exclusively learned.
The film marks the second feature from writer-director John Burr, following his 2017 supernatural thriller “Muse,” which played the horror and thriller festival circuit before landing on Tubi.
“The Gates” follows three college students — Derek, Kevin and Tyon (Gooding, Smith and Powers) — on a road trip gone wrong. The trio takes an ill-advised shortcut through a remote gated community, where they find themselves trapped after witnessing a murder. Over the course of the night, they are blamed, hunted and fractured by their own differing belief systems, while the perpetrator — played by Van Der Beek — emerges as the cunning patriarch who holds the entire community under his influence.
“This script is the most personal story I’ve ever written,” Burr said in a statement to TheWrap. “It’s set in the community I lived in for the first half of my life, and its characters are an amalgam of myself and my closest friends growing up.”
“Growing up as a biracial person who identified strongly as half-black but who was afforded the occasional benefits that came with being able to pass as white, my perspectives often did not align with those of my white friends, while my experiences did not always align with those of my black friends,” Burr said in a statement. “Trusting authority figures was a privilege. Understanding that not all of my friends had that privilege was a journey. This film explores that journey through a propulsive genre lens.”
The film is produced by Nancy Leopardi (“The Cure”) of Indy Entertainment, Ross Kohn (“Maggie Moore(s)”) of the newly launched Core 4 Films, and Gary Glushon (“24 Hours to Live”).
Executive producers include Michael Cassutt, John Harris, J. Todd Harris, Kamala Avila-Salmon, Arlie Day, Mike Page, Andy Dube, Courtney Henggeler, Eric Belgau, Damian Horan, David Gendron, Ali Jazayeri, Viviana Zarragoitia and Mason Gooding.
The film was made possible through the Oklahoma Film & Music incentive and the Cherokee Film incentive. Rebellium Films oversaw physical production, with financing provided by TPC.
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