Halle Berry is Building a Powerhouse Slate With Apple Films, HBO, Peacock, FX, Including THE PRESIDENT IS MISSING

Halle Berry isn’t just picking film and TV projects. She’s building an empire.

Through her production banner HalleHolly with partner Holly Jeter, the Oscar winner has quietly assembled one of the most ambitious film and TV slates in Hollywood right now.

We’re talking Apple Original Films, HBO, Peacock, FX, Lionsgate, and a mix of thrillers, comedies, horror, and prestige adaptations, most of them with Berry starring front and center.

At a time when many actors are narrowing their focus, Berry is doing the opposite, spreading across genres and platforms with a lineup that feels deliberate, personal, and surprisingly fun.

The headline project is The President Is Missing, the high-profile adaptation of the Bill Clinton and James Patterson bestseller now in development at Apple Original Films. Berry is set to star as President Joanna Duncan in a gender-swapped take on the story, with Nicole Perlman and David Chasteen writing the script.

The premise is pure blockbuster fuel. When a terrorist threatens an attack capable of sending the country into a technological dark age, the only person who can stop it is the president herself. But first she has to escape the White House and her own Secret Service.

“When a terrorist threatens an attack so lethal it will return the United States to the dark ages, the only person who can stop him is President Joanna Duncan (Berry) — but first she has to elude her own secret service and escape the confines of the White House in a gambit to save the world single-handedly.”

The book was published in 2018, and nearly became a Showtime series before the pandemic derailed that version. Apple is now taking a fresh swing with Berry leading the charge, alongside producers Joe Roth, Jeff Kirschenbaum, Clinton, and Patterson.

On the feature side, Berry is also lining up a very different kind of ride with Bad Cop, Bad Cop, an action comedy directed by Kay Cannon. She’ll star opposite Fortune Feimster and Jillian Bell as a hardened detective dragging two wildly unprepared beat cops into the chaos.

“In it, two inept beat cops, Molly (Bell) & Devon (Feimster) get taken under the wing of a badass female detective (Halle Berry), who brings them on the ride along of their lives. To survive, they’ll have to forget every lesson they never learned, and break every rule they never followed.”

That one’s coming from HalleHolly and Beau Bauman’s A Good One, with Feimster and Bell also helping shape the script. It sounds like a straight-up crowd-pleaser.

Television is where the slate really fans out.

At Peacock, Berry is attached to star in Zero F***s, a menopause-themed murder comedy that blends dark humor with personal subject matter Berry has been outspoken about for years. The series is described as “a comedy about embracing your second act when you finally stop giving a f**k.”

The show follows three menopausal best friends, one played by Berry, who are forced to solve the murder of a friend they couldn’t stand. “But how do you solve a murder when you can’t remember why you came into the room?”

Berry and Jeter executive produce alongside Liz Kruger, Carolyn Townsend, and a full team from A+E Studios, Range Studios, and Universal Television. It’s funny, strange, and clearly close to Berry’s own advocacy work with menopause awareness and her Respin Health platform.

Over at HBO, Berry is developing The Patient, a psychological horror series based on the viral Reddit novella by Jasper DeWitt. This one leans into unsettling prestige horror.

“In the psychological horror story, ambitious young psychiatrist Parker attempts to make a name for himself by treating Josephine Todd (Berry), the famously incurable patient at his hospital. But as he unwinds the mystery of her history, and delves deeper into her troubled mind, terrible things start happening – is she a victim or a predator, cursed or the curse itself? As he gets closer to the truth, he realizes that treating her might cost him his own sanity, or much worse.”

Jeter originally sold the short story in 2018 while at WME in a bidding war involving 36 companies. Years later, after teaming up with Berry, they reworked it into a series and gender-swapped the lead for Berry to star.

FX may also be getting Berry in a revenge drama with Mother Doom, based on a short story by Sean Lewis and written by Matthew Sand.

“Based on a short story by Sean Lewis, FX’s Mother Doom centers on Riley who has been retired from the Special Forces for twenty years, but when her son is killed in the line of duty, she goes back into her past to find his murderer and get revenge.”

Berry could potentially star as Riley, with Project X producing alongside HalleHolly.

The film slate underneath all of this is just as busy.

HalleHolly has three more star vehicles in development: Sunburn for director Liz Garbus, Family Swap for director Jason Moore, and Parole Officer, which landed at Imagine after a bidding war.

Family Swap adapts the French film Le Sens de la famille and leans into full-on chaos. “With a father who has all but given up, a disconnected mother, 2 moody teenagers and a tempestuous little one – there’s already plenty of drama for one family to manage.

“However, when they all wake up to find that they’re in each other’s bodies – and when it keeps happening, morning after morning – the chaos continues to escalate.”

Parole Officer goes darker and more twisted. “In it, a parolee looking to stay on the straight and narrow is seduced by a mysterious woman into a drug-fueled one-night stand, violating the rules of his parole. The woman (Berry) turns out to be his newly appointed parole officer, who unleashes a plan to blackmail him into committing an escalating series of crimes or else he’ll be sent back to prison for the rest of his life.”

There’s also The Boy Who Knew Too Much, based on Cathy Byrd’s memoir, which leans into reincarnation, baseball, and a child who may have lived a past life as Lou Gehrig.

“In the vein of The Blind Side meets The Sixth Sense, The Boy Who Knew Too Much tells the true story of a young boy named Christian Haupt, who, from a very young age, displays an uncanny knowledge of baseball and vivid memories of a past life as Lou Gehrig, the famous Yankee.”

And then there’s Fleur, a neo-noir psychological thriller that begins production in Paris on March 16.

“The neo-noir psychological thriller tells the story of a complicated woman scheming towards freedom — from her past crimes, her present loves, her secrets, and all the masks she’s worn along the way.”

This all builds on HalleHolly’s first produced project, the 2024 survival horror film Never Let Go, and signals where Berry is steering her career next.

Berry is moving between studio thrillers, genre TV, prestige horror, and sharp comedies, almost always in stories centered on complicated women with agency, secrets, and bite. With Apple, HBO, Peacock, and FX all in the mix, HalleHolly is quickly becoming one of the more interesting production banners in town.

If even half of these projects land the way they’re intended, Halle Berry’s next act could be her most exciting one yet.

Source: Deadline