EXCLUSIVE: I have been hearing that things have been going sideways the past few days on Paramount’s Triple Frontier, and now I’ve confirmed that Paramount has dropped out of the drama that J.C. Chandor was supposed to start production on next month. Channing Tatum and Tom Hardy also are officially out.

Given how hard it is to mount adult-themed feature films in this marketplace, this is terrible news. Tatum and Hardy have been set for some time, and they recently added Oscar winning Moonlight star Mahershala Ali and Adria Arjona for the Mark Boal-scripted thriller set in the notorious border zone between Paraguay, Argentina and Brazil where the Iguazu and Parana rivers converge. This is the film that Katherine Bigelow once planned to direct, and which at one time Tom Hanks and Will Smith and Johnny Depp circled, so it has its fans. The pic is being produced by Charles Roven and Alex Gartner.

Michael Buckner

I had heard earlier that Chandor turned in a rewrite that Tatum and Hardy didn’t love, and they were teetering. Sources said that for Paramount, this project was being done on a tight schedule and for a price, and that once creative differences imperiled that goal and requests were made for more extensive changes — I’ve heard those requests came from Hardy — the studio today declined to move forward. There’s also the added element that the studio has had a changeover at the top, and this one was championed by Brad Grey, who’s not there anymore. These kinds of things happen. The filmmaker will regroup and hopefully re-mount it with a different cast, at a later time. Will tell you more when I know it.