Tradecraft: Fuqua to Direct Ethan Hawke Spy Pilot

Deadline reports that Fox has put in a pilot order for the previously announced Ethan Hawke Mission: Impossible meets 24 spy series, Exit Strategy, and tapped Antoine Fuqua (Shooter) to direct.  Fuqua directed Hawke to an Oscar nomination in Training Day.  As reported last fall, Exit Strategy comes from producers Alex Kurtzman and Roberto Orci, who toil frequently in the espionage genre (Alias, Mission: Impossible III, Jack of All Trades, the new Hawaii Five-O) and writer David Guggenheim (the upcoming Denzel Washington spy thriller Safe House). Like Mission: Impossible (the series), Exit Strategy follows a team of highly-skilled specialists (with Hawke playing the Peter Graves role of team leader) who are sent in when a CIA mission goes bad and agents need extracting.  Like 24, the action unfolds in real time. Unlike 24, each episode unfolds in a single hour in a single far-flung locale, rather than making up a season-long sleepless day in one city. I love Mission: Impossible and I tend to like its imitators, so I'm looking forward to this one.

As far as I know, Fuqua is also still attached to Consent to Kill, a long-in-development feature envisioned as the first in a series based on Vince Flynn's Mitch Rapp spy novels.