Netflix Buys Liam Neeson's Next Action Flick 'The Ice Road'

There are a few givens in this industry, two of them being: Netflix has a bottomless well of money to burn through, and Liam Neeson is not yet done making action movies. Both are true in this latest acquisition news story, which is that Netflix has set a record for domestic-only deals for the Liam Neeson action-thriller The Ice Road.

Deadline reports that Netflix has forked over $18 million for the Liam Neeson and Laurence Fisburne action thriller The Ice Road, setting a record for domestic-only deals out of the European Film Market, or EFM. The streaming giant won the U.S. rights to The Ice Road in a deal closed over the weekend as virtual EFM sales were underway, beating out multiple buyers for the film, per Deadline.

Here is the logline for The Ice Road:

In The Ice Road, after a remote diamond mine collapses in the far northern regions of Canada, an ice driver (Neeson) leads an impossible rescue mission over a frozen ocean to save the lives of trapped miners despite thawing waters and a threat they never see coming.

The movie sounds like a grim action thriller along the lines of Neeson's 2011 survival film The Grey — a bleak drama which was one of the rare non-action films for the actor, who has been making genre films nonstop since the 2008 film Taken inexplicably turned the former prestige actor of dramas like Schindler's List into an action hero. But the actor has been getting up in age, and has claimed frequently over the past couple years that he's done with the genre — only to walk back his retirement to churn out a few more. But after the next few, he's done, Neeson recently claimed.

Once The Ice Road and an upcoming assassin movie called Memory are released, Neeson claims he's done with the action genre for good. At least that's what he said earlier this year. "Oh, yeah. I think so. I'm 68 and a half. There's a couple more I'm going to do this year – hopefully, Covid allowing us – there's a couple in the pipeline and then I think that will probably be it," Neeson said.

The Ice Road is  written and directed by Die Hard With A Vengeance and Armageddon scribe Jonathan Hensleigh. CODE Entertainment produced and financed alongside ShivHans Pictures. Envision Media Arts also produced.

CAA Media finance brokered the deal with Netflix. The Solution handled foreign sales and has sold the movie well around the world.