Oscar Isaac Out, Taron Egerton In: Channing Tatum’s Crime Drama Kockroach Lands a New Lead

Taron Egerton is suiting up for a new gangster saga with Channing Tatum and Zazie Beetz, and yes, it’s called Kockroach. Bold title. Bolder pitch.

What Kockroach actually is

The movie follows a mysterious outsider who muscles his way into New York’s underworld and reinvents himself as a larger-than-life crime boss in a city where power rules everything. Producer Andrew Lazar is framing it as a modern swing at the kind of world Goodfellas and Scarface lived in. Big comparison. We’ll see if it earns it.

The casting shuffle

Egerton is stepping in for Oscar Isaac, who was originally attached but bailed due to scheduling conflicts. So now it’s Egerton opposite Tatum and Beetz, which is a pretty fun triangle for a crime drama.

Behind the camera

Matt Ross, who made Captain Fantastic, is directing. Jonathan Ames (Bored to Death) wrote the script from William Lashner’s novel, with Ross doing revisions. Filming is set to start in Australia in February. Yes, an NYC crime story shooting in Australia — one of those practical-production things that always makes me curious about how they’ll sell the city on screen.

• Cast: Taron Egerton, Channing Tatum, Zazie Beetz
• Egerton replaces: Oscar Isaac (scheduling conflicts)
• Director: Matt Ross (Captain Fantastic)
• Writer: Jonathan Ames (Bored to Death), based on William Lashner’s novel; revisions by Ross
• Producer: Andrew Lazar, positioning it in the vein of Goodfellas/Scarface
• Key creative team: Oscar-winning production designer Colin Gibson, cinematographer Adam Arkapaw, VFX supervisor Jonathan Dearing
• Production: Starts in Australia in February

Where Egerton’s been lately

He’s on a heater. He just starred in the crime drama She Rides Shotgun. He’s also leading Smoke, an Apple TV series about a detective and an arson investigator teaming up to stop two serial arsonists. And Carry-On, his holiday-set action thriller, is currently sitting at #3 on Netflix’s list of its most popular movies ever. Not shabby.

There’s been chatter about a Carry-On sequel. Egerton has kicked ideas around with director Jaume Collet-Serra, but he’s not convinced it’s doable without forcing it — especially given the first movie’s Christmas vibe and, as he puts it, that very specific earwig plot device.

'Carry-On 2 is really hard. It’s a celebration of Christmas and a celebration of people who work at Christmas,' he said. 'It then needs to have this huge plot that needs to be foiled and maybe the earwig component. All of that is quite hard to achieve in a sequel without it feeling contrived and to the point of defying credulity. So I have not heard anything, but who knows, stranger things have happened.'

For now, the focus is Kockroach. If Ross and this crew deliver the punch Lazar is promising, we might be talking about Egerton’s latest crime turn for a while.