Apple Lands 'The Waffle House Index' with Inde Navarrette Starring
Apple Original Films has landed the rights to "The Waffle House Index," a disaster-tinged thriller that will star Inde Navarrette, with Plan B producing and Louis Paxton attached to direct. The package began coming together in August, and Apple moved quickly to secure it, according to Deadline.
Andrew Nunnelly wrote the script, which landed on the 2025 Black List — the annual survey of Hollywood's best-loved unproduced screenplays. The title refers to a real-world informal metric that FEMA uses to gauge a natural disaster's severity: green means a Waffle House is running full service, yellow means a limited menu and low supplies, and red means the restaurant has shut its doors entirely. The Hollywood Reporter, which also broke the story, notes that the script's deal was in the seven figures.
In the film, a character named Jane works the graveyard shift at her local Waffle House with a storm closing in. Her bad night takes a sharp turn when a stranger with a gun arrives. From there, the script piles on complications that include a mass flood, killer crocodiles, a nuclear explosion, a magical bunker beneath the restaurant, and aliens — a cascade that sits somewhere between disaster film and midnight movie.
Navarrette will also serve as executive producer. The actor broke onto the scene as Estela De La Cruz in the fourth and final season of Netflix's "13 Reasons Why," then appeared in the CW series "Superman & Lois." Her breakout came in Curry Barker's horror hit "Obsession," which has grossed over $505 million worldwide. Her character from that film is featured at Halloween Horror Nights at Universal Studios. She recently landed the role of Rogue in Marvel's upcoming X-Men movie.
Paxton brings his own heat. His film "The Incomer," which won the Sundance Film Festival NEXT Innovator Award, reaches theatres later this month.
Nunnelly is also at work on "Anomaly" for Searchlight Pictures, with Rhys Thomas attached to direct, and is developing "The Sleep Train" with Thomas as well.
Plan B — led by Brad Pitt, Dede Gardner and Jeremy Kleiner — produces. The company was one of the entities behind Pitt's racing drama "F1" and recently produced the horror film "Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma." Next on the Plan B docket is "The Bell Jar," a drama directed by Sarah Polley now in preparation.
Apple Studios will serve as the studio on the project. No release date has been announced.
