Writer/director Alex Ullom and NEON are reuniting for a new horror thriller titled “4 X 4: The Event,” which has nabbed quite an impressive grouping of young acting talent for roles. The project has already wrapped, and the news comes as his upcoming theatrical release, “It Ends,” had critics and audiences buzzing at SXSW and debuts this weekend.
NEON revealed the young ensemble includes Sophia Lillis (“IT”), Dylan Minnette (“13 Reasons Why”), Marcel Ruiz (“One Day at a Time”), Quintessa Swindell (“Teenage Sex & Death at Camp Miasma”), Maddie Phillips (“Gen V”), Mitchell Cole (“It Ends”), Jaden Smith (“The Karate Kid”), and Jacob Tremblay (“Room”).
The studio also revealed a brief description of the new film: “4 X 4: The Event follows eight contestants as they enter an illegal sensory-assault livestream where they must kill or be killed using only what they can order online.”
Producers assembled for the project include Roy Lee and Steven Schneider via their impressive genre banner, Spooky Pictures; Adam Hendricks and Greg Gilreath for Divide/Conquer; Chris Ferguson and Osgood Perkins for Phobos Pictures; Haley Johnson (at Under the Shell); and Evan Barber (at Barbershop). A group of executive producers on the film includes Ben Ross for Image Nation Studios, Jakob Pollack, Rami Yasin and Simmy Wolf for Spooky Pictures, and Jesse Savath and Marlaina Mah for Phobos.
Spooky Pictures and Image Nation Studios produced “4 X 4: The Event” under a multi-title partnership, alongside Divide/Conquer and Phobos, with the aforementioned NEON scooping up the global rights to the genre-bending horror flick earlier in 2026. This marks the second project between the studio and Ullom.
We’re sure that once “It Ends” is released this weekend and when the press tour finishes, NEON will likely start sharing more details and maybe even some early images for Ullom’s follow-up, as it’s seemingly in post-production.
From our perspective, “4 X 4: The Event” sounds like a modern Western tech-focused spin on Koushun Takami’s 1999 novel “Battle Royale,” which was adapted into a Japanese sci-fi thriller featuring a state-sponsored battle-to-the-death game among high school-aged kids monitored with explosive collars and given various weapons to fend off classmates. A film helmed by legendary filmmaker Kinji Fukasaku (considered Japan’s Martin Scorsese or Francis Ford Coppola, best known for the Yakuza-focused “Battles Without Honor & Humanity” franchise), often cited as the direct inspiration for “The Hunger Games” books/films and modern last-man-standing video games.
