Leah McKendrick and Maddie Ziegler Set for Thriller Delulu
Leah McKendrick is set to direct, star in and write Delulu, a thriller about fame, with Maddie Ziegler co-starring. Deadline reported the casting on 10 November 2026.
The premise is a kidnapping. McKendrick plays a washed-up millennial pop singer, meaning someone from the generation born in the early 1980s to mid-1990s who had a hit career that has faded. She takes a rising Gen Z influencer, played by Ziegler, hostage. Gen Z is the generation born in the late 1990s and early 2010s, and an influencer is someone who builds a large online audience and earns from it.
Her demand is simple and unkind: get her a million followers in two weeks, or die.
Deadline describes the film as a bloody showdown about fame, envy and the strange intimacy of girlhood.
McKendrick is also an executive producer. The film comes from two companies. XYZ Films is financing it, and Guy Danella is producing for XYZ. Temple Hill is the other company behind the project, with Wyck Godfrey, Marty Bowen, Isaac Klausner and Laura Quicksilver producing. Hal Sadoff is executive-producing, according to the same report.
XYZ is also launching sales on the project at the American Film Market, known as the AFM. The AFM is a deal market held each November in Santa Monica, California, where sales companies show films and projects to distributors from around the world. A sales launch is the stage where those buyers are first invited to make offers, and it usually comes well before a film is finished.
Production is set for 2027. The report did not give a shooting location, a release date or a distributor.
The project is a useful marker of how these films get made. A writer who is also starring, a financier that is also selling the film, and two producing companies all had to line up before a single frame was shot. Those decisions, made in boardrooms and at market stands, are what will decide how and where audiences see it.
