Thunder Road Teams With Adam Kolbrenner’s Lit Entertainment Group To Launch New Media Company TR/AK

Thunder Road Films’ Basil Iwanyk and Erica Lee have partnered with Lit Entertainment Group’s Adam Kolbrenner to launch TR/AK, a new media company centering commercially ambitious and original film and television for global audiences.

The venture brings together the company behind the John Wick franchise and a management and production company repping an expansive roster of today’s leading writers and creators — Shōgun‘s Justin Marks, among them.

Thunder Road and Lit will continue to operate independently. Launching with an established creative pipeline, TR/AK will fill out its exec team as the company builds out its finance, operations and corporate infrastructure.

TR/AK formalizes a long-standing collaboration between Iwanyk, Lee and Kolbrenner that most recently spanned three films from spec screenplays by Lit clients: Sascha Penn’s By Any Means, starring Mark Wahlberg and Yahya Abdul-Mateen II, which Paramount released September 4; Roshan Sethi’s The Surgeon, starring Michelle Yeoh and Martin Freeman, which is coming up on its TIFF premiere; and the Zach Dean-penned Day Drinker, an action thriller for Lionsgate directed by Marc Webb and starring Johnny Depp, Penélope Cruz and Madelyn Cline.

Thunder Road’s Iwanyk explained, “Erica and I have been thinking of how to grow Thunder Road for years and Adam is a longtime friend and collaborator with us. The more we talked, the more we realized we had a shared vision and ambition in creating the most expansive and dynamic independent company in town.”

Lit Entertainment Group’s Kolbrenner added, “Basil, Erica and the Thunder Road team have built their company by trusting their instincts and doing the work required to get ambitious movies made. That’s very much how we operate at Lit. TR/AK is about bringing those teams together, backing great writers and filmmakers for projects that can connect with audiences around the world.”

Thunder Road’s films have collectively grossed more than $4.4 billion worldwide, while projects written by Lit clients have generated more than $7 billion at the global box office, in addition to thousands of hours of television.

Thunder Road is currently in production on Hivemind, an environmental thriller starring Samara Weaving and Nicholas Braun that we scooped after breaking news last year of Peter Gaffney’s spec sale to Badlands, the nascent indie genre label teaming Thunder Road with longtime Sony exec Scott Strauss.

Thunder Road’s upcoming slate includes A24’s The Peasant, directed and starring Dev Patel; the Amazon MGM actioner The Kellys, starring Arnold Schwarzenegger, Liam Hemsworth and Geena Davis; the Walton Goggins action vehicle Mister; and Caine, the latest in the John Wick franchise starring and directed by Donnie Yen. Other upcoming titles include Perfect Girl, Breaking Point, Crawlers, Dangerous Games and Blasphemous.

As a producer, Kolbrenner’s recent credits include Apple’s The Gorge, the Ryan Reynolds-led Free Guy, Chris Pine vehicle The Tomorrow War, Denis Villeneuve’s Prisoners, the Christmas Chronicles franchise and the Ridley Scott-directed series Raised by Wolves. Alongside its lit roster, Lit reps a library of more than 10,000 stories and characters through partnerships with NeoText, Weird Tales, Heavy Metal, Meridia Books, Weekly World News, Zenescope Comics and others.

CAA Media Finance-Evolution was a strategic advisor on the transaction.