Daniel Peddle to Adapt Michael Sledge's Southern Crime Thriller 'Cold Moon Rising' for the Big Screen
Daniel Peddle has signed on to adapt Michael Sledge's debut novel Cold Moon Rising as a feature film, Deadline reported exclusively on 20 August 2026. The project is being developed in close collaboration with Sledge himself, keeping the author inside the adaptation process rather than handing the material to a screenwriter working at arm's length.
Cold Moon Rising is a Southern crime thriller set across the contemporary American South. The plot kicks off with a violent home invasion and spirals outward into kidnapping, deception, corruption, and murder — territory that, on the page, reads as the opening salvo of a series rather than a standalone story (Deadline).
The novel is the first entry in Sledge's Quinn series, which follows detectives Jimmy Quinn and Micky Bondurant. Quinn, a North Carolina writer's creation, is described as sharp and witty, shaped by a dysfunctional family upbringing — the kind of character detail that tends to translate well when an author is in the room during the screenplay stage.
Peddle comes to the project from the documentary world. He directed The Aggressives, which premiered at SXSW in 2005, and its follow-up Beyond the Aggressives: 25 Years Later, released in 2023, which revisited four original participants — Kisha, Trevon, Octavio, and Chin — across the decades since the first film. Showtime acquired the sequel, and earlier in summer 2026 both documentaries were picked up by the Criterion Channel, placing Peddle's non-fiction catalogue alongside some of the most curated film libraries available to stream (Deadline).
He is also attached to direct Rose Moon, an original screenplay described as a Southern Gothic psychological drama starring Gabourey Sidibe. That project and Cold Moon Rising together point a filmmaker known for intimate documentary portraiture toward Southern-set narrative fiction — a lane where atmosphere and character carry as much weight as plot.
No production timeline, cast beyond Sidibe's separate attachment, or distribution arrangement for Cold Moon Rising has been announced. The film remains in the development stage, where a screenplay is written and a package of creative elements is assembled before financing and a greenlight follow.
