Tom Brittney to Lead Supernatural Film 'Black Box (Flight 298)'

Tom Brittney's final episodes on Grantchester are due to start airing on PBS when Season 9 debuts in mid-June. However, the actor hasn't been sitting still since deciding his time as the show's resident Hot Priest was up. First, he launched a production company with Oliver Powell called Wild Nest Pictures. Since then, he's lined up multiple directing/producing projects, including a limited series about the 2018 arrests of  Trevor Birney & Barry McCaffrey after their documentary about the 1994 massacre of six men by Loyalist paramilitaries directly implicated the police, a TV adaptation of The Mayfair 100 novel series, and Goodnight Darling, the story of Mavis Eccleston, charged with murder after helping her terminally ill husband die with dignity. 

Now he's landed the lead role in Black Box (Flight 298), a supernatural thriller set to begin filming in June 2024. The movie is based on Clark Baker's short film The Vessel, which was made in 2012 and reportedly scooped up by Paramount Pictures to be made into a feature film at the time; Baker supposedly would direct. Of course, that was over a decade ago, two years before Grantchester even existed in the first place. A dozen years on, Paramount Pictures is in the middle of turning into a mountain of rubble as shareholders bicker over who gets to sell it for parts, the rights to the film are now in the hands of Capstone and Hammerstone Studios, and Stephen Quale (Into the Storm) is directing from a script by The Grudge's Stephen Susco.

Brittney's casting was announced alongside his main co-stars, including Holly White (Home & Away) and Betsy Blue English (they credit her with Four Weddings & a Funeral, but you know her as the blonde from The X-Factor UK's Only The Young).

Here's the film's logline:

Based on the short film The Vessel, Black Box examines the supernatural events that surround the fictional Vero Airlines Flight 298 from New Orleans to Seattle. 

Alongside Brittney, White, and English, the film also announced a supporting cast that includes Dana Whyte O’Hara (Darklands), Danny Mac (Hollyoaks), Kaja Chan (1899), Asa Ali (Euphoria), Boadicea Ricketts (Grantchester), Cel Spellman (White Lines) and Molly Belle Wright (Deep Water). 

Scriptwriter Stephen Susco will produce alongside Warren Zide, Alex Lebovici, and Jon Oakes for Hammerstone Studios and Christian Mercuri and David Haring for Capstone. Ruzanna Kegeyan and Roman Viaris executive produce for Capstone, as does original scriptwriter Clark Baker. 

Black Box (Flight 298) is expected out in late 2025 or early 2026.