Apple Makes Big Deal For Elliot Ackerman Novel ‘Sheepdogs’; Paramilitary Tale Mounted For Series By Playtone’s Tom Hanks & Gary Goetzman

EXCLUSIVE: In a strong year-end book deal, Apple Studios has paid seven figures for the Elliot Ackerman novel Sheepdogs for Playtone partners Tom Hanks and Gary Goetzman to develop as a series. The book will be published summer 2025 by Alfred K. Knopf/Penguin Random House. Eleven bidders were in the mix.

Ackerman is a former Marine Corps special operations team leader whose books include Halcyon, Green on Blue and Waiting for Eden. He also co-wrote 2034 and sequel 2054 with Admiral James Stavridis.

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Sheepdogs revolves around Skwerl and Cheese, two elite paramilitary soldiers down on their luck. Skwerl is an ex-Marine who used to work for the CIA’s elite paramilitary wing but was fired after a raid went bad in Afghanistan. Big Cheese Aziz is a legendary pilot, but the fall of Kabul has left him working the nightshift at a gas station. Skwerl recruits Cheese into an anonymous network of so-called sheepdogs, who operate in the shadowy space between predator and prey. Their mission, which Skwerl persuades a reluctant Cheese to accept, is to repossess a private jet stranded on a remote African airfield. Their fee: a commission on the jet’s $5 million value. But nothing about the job adds up. Their contact goes missing. Their handler is as mysterious as the real source of the money. And when the women in their lives get involved — one pregnant wife and one a dominatrix — the stakes skyrocket.

As things go awry, they join forces with an eccentric bomb technician-turned off-the-grid survivalist, a lapsed Amish adventurer, a used car dealer elected to Congress and a case officer known as the White Russian. Together they take a wild ride through the underbelly of modern war and intelligence, hopefully headed for redemption.

Hanks and Goetzman’s Playtone is coming off the acclaimed WWII series Masters of the Air, and they are gearing up for a sequel to Greyhound, with Hanks again starring in the script he’s written and Aaron Schneider directing. The first film was based on The Good Shepherd by C.S. Forester.

CAA brokered the deal for PJ Mark at Janklow & Nesbit.

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