With ancient Greek tale The Odyssey still slashing its way to peak box office, the sword and sorcery age remains a potent genre for Hollywood.

Now, Paramount Primal, Paramount’s low-budget genre label formed by producers J.D. Lifshitz and Raphael Margules, has picked up Tower Defense, an original Medieval fantasy from longtime adventure movie scribe Evan Daugherty.

The spec script sale comes with no filmmaker or producer attachments.

Plot details are being kept in the castle keep, but it is being described as a Medieval and supernatural fantasy twist on the concept seen in the early John Carpenter movie Assault on Precinct 13. The 1976 exploitation movie was set in a police station on the eve of the building’s retirement. It told of a group of people, including a police officer and a prisoner, who must survive a brutal gang attack. The movie was inspired by the John Wayne Western Rio Bravo.

The aim is to make the feature R-rated.

Louis Winters is overseeing the project for Paramount Primal.

Daugherty has been involved with some of the bigger franchise movies in the 2010s. He may be best known for writing Snow White and the Huntsman, a spec that brought an action fantasy bent to the well-known fairy tale. Universal made the movie, which starred Kirsten Stewart, Chris Hemsworth and Charlize Theron. It went on to gross nearly $400 million worldwide.

He subsequently wrote the Lionsgate YA movie Divergent, the live-action/CG hybrid Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles for Paramount, and the Tomb Raider reboot that starred Alicia Vikander for MGM and Warner Bros. Collectively, his films have grossed more than $1.5 billion worldwide.

Paramount Primal is been hustling since being established late 2025. It is in production on its first feature, Boys for Life, a comedy that Paramount has dated for April 9, 2027. In July, it acquired an original erotic thriller spec script titled Sweet Spot by screenwriting social media influencer Nic Curcio and his wife Kirby Gladstein. And it made waves in July when it picked up the domestic screen rights to Wes Craven’s original A Nightmare on Elm Street script.

Daugherty is repped by Verve, Alibi Entertainment and McKuin Frankel.

EXCLUSIVE: Fourth Act Films has set the theatrical release for First They Came for My College, a documentary about a right-wing “coup” at a Florida liberal arts school orchestrated by Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis.

The film directed and produced by Patrick Bresnan will open Sept. 17 at the Hippodrome in Gainesville, FL and on Sept. 25 at the DCTV Firehouse Cinema in New York City. It will hit theaters in over 30 markets total, including Los Angeles, San Francisco, Houston, Austin, TX, St. Petersburg, FL, Sarasota, FL, Lawrence, KS, Columbus, OH, and Springfield, MO.

“First They Came For My College tells the inside story of the right-wing campaign to ‘reconquer’ higher education in America,” notes a release. “New College of Florida was the first public college to be transformed by a political coup—a blueprint for our new era of unprecedented censorship and political interference in academia. By embedding with the student newspaper, an outspoken professor, and students from all sides of the political spectrum, this verité feature reveals a microcosm of America’s culture wars and serves as an essential document for students today grappling with their moment in history.”

Gov. DeSantis began the takeover in 2023 by appointing “six ultraconservatives to the school’s Board of Trustees, including Christopher Rufo, the right-wing activist behind attacks on Critical Race Theory, and Matthew Spalding, who would go on to play a leading role in Project 2025.”

The documentary, which premiered at True/False in Columbia, MO, shows how faculty and students mounted “a fierce resistance, exposing what they see as the new administration’s cruelty, incompetence, and corruption.”

In a statement, director-producer Patrick Bresnan said, “For me, we will hopefully look back on First They Came For My College like we do on civil rights-era films or Vietnam-era films and we say, ‘I can’t believe that’s who we were. I can’t believe that’s what we did to our greatest professors. I can’t believe that’s what we did to college students.’ What kept me going is the need to finish this document so that we can remember this period and so it doesn’t happen again.”

Along with Bresnan, First They Came For My College is produced by Holly Herrick, Harry William Hanbury, and Zackary Drucker.

“As alumni of New College, we couldn’t look away when we heard about the state of Florida’s plans for an ideological remaking of the school,” commented Herrick and Hanbury. “New College’s academic environment changed our lives, and we wanted to understand what it would mean for students experiencing that same transformation to have their education interrupted by a staged battle in America’s culture wars: one that targeted LGBTQ+ students and the ideals of diversity, equity, and inclusion, and tried—unsuccessfully—to silence dissent. In sharing this story around the country, we hope to inspire others to defend and support the freedom to learn and the freedom to be who you are.”

The documentary features several New College students, including Gabriella Batista. “At New College, we had a culture of radical acceptance, where people could live authentically,” Batista said. “And that’s what the people who took over the school tried to stamp out. But we doubled down, resisted relentlessly, took care of each other, and found joy in community. Now it’s up to all of us who lived through that ordeal to warn other schools of what’s coming and show how to stand up to right-wing bullies.”

The film’s executive producers are Ross Boucher, Steve Phillips, Margaret Brown, and Kim A. Snyder. Patrick Bresnan serves as the director of photography along with Sara Kinney. Leah Marino and Ivete Lucas edited the film. Music is by Michael Montes.

Oscar winner Steven Bognar, and Primetime Emmy winners Jesse Moss and Amanda McBaine serve as consulting producers along with co-producers Monique Walton, Heather Courtney, and Daniel Raphael Potthast.

Bresnan and other members of the film team participated in a Q&A after the world premiere at True/False. He explained why he poured his creative energies into First They Came For My College.

“I fell in love with the students. I fell in love with the teachers,” Bresnan said. “And we had made a film in Florida [Pahokee] about a senior high school in a super-segregated rural farming village. And I just felt like this was the sequel to that film and I needed to be there. So that’s how it happened.”