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Plan B is producing the 2025 Black List sci-fi thriller, and yes — that plot description is real.
Inde Navarretteis having the kind of year most actors wait a career for, and her momentum is quickly carrying her across genres. Following her breakout in the horror phenomenonObsessionand her casting as Rogue in Marvel’sX-Menreboot, the 25-year-old actress has landed the lead inThe Waffle House Index, a sci-fi thriller set up at Apple Original Films with Brad Pitt’s Plan B producing.
The news broke Thursday viaDeadlineandThe Hollywood Reporter, and the logline is the most gloriously unhinged thing to cross our desk in months.
About That Plot
Navarrette plays a Waffle House waitress working the graveyard shift as a storm rolls in. What follows is, by all accounts, the worst night shift in the history of the American service industry: an armed stranger walks in, and then comes the mass flooding, the killer crocodiles, a nuclear explosion, a magical bunker underneath the Waffle House, and — naturally — aliens.
That is not a bit. That is the actual reported premise.
The title comes from a real thing. TheWaffle House Indexis an informal metric FEMA has used for years to gauge the severity of a natural disaster: because the chain is famous for staying open through hurricanes, whether a given location is serving a full menu, a limited menu, or is closed entirely tells emergency responders how badly an area got hit. Green, yellow, red. If the Waffle House is closed, things are very bad.
ScreenwriterAndrew Nunnelly(Anomaly,Sleep Train) built a genre gauntlet around that idea. His spec landed on the2025 Black List— Hollywood’s annual survey of its most-liked unproduced screenplays — where it tied for 17th place with 17 votes. The script’s official Black List logline is a small masterpiece of restraint:
“The following three things are true: 1. The WAFFLE HOUSE INDEX is a metric used by FEMA to measure the severity of a natural disaster. 2. Jane works the graveyard shift at her local Waffle House. 3. There’s a storm coming.”
Who’s Making It
Directing isLouis Paxton, the Scottish filmmaker whose feature debutThe Incomer— a folk-tinged oddity starring Domhnall Gleeson and Gayle Rankin — won the NEXT Innovator Award at the 2026 Sundance Film Festival before Sumerian picked it up. Paxton has a demonstrated appetite for tonal whiplash, which this material appears to require in bulk.
Plan Bis producing, withApple Studioshaving moved on the package in August. Navarrette will also executive produce, her first credit in that chair.
No additional casting has been announced, and production has not yet begun. Trades peg a theatrical window somewhere in late 2027 or spring 2028.
Navarrette’s Genre Run
For iHorror readers, Navarrette needs little introduction at this point. Her turn as Nikki Freeman inObsessionturned a modest independent horror film into a worldwide box office monster, made Nikki one of the year’s most recognizable new horror characters, and earned her a Best Performance prize at the Seattle International Film Festival. Universal has since had the character roaming Halloween Horror Nights.
She was announced at D23 as Rogue in Jake Schreier’sX-Men, due May 5, 2028, and she still has the rollercoaster-set thrillerInvertigoin the pipeline. Before all of that, she was Sarah Cortez across four seasons ofSuperman & Loisand Estela de la Cruz on the final season of13 Reasons Why.
One year, one indie horror hit, and she’s gone from The CW to Marvel, Plan B, and Apple. The Waffle House Index for her career is reading solidly green.
One note: neither Apple nor Plan B has announced any formal partnership with Waffle House itself, so whether the finished film gets to use the yellow sign remains an open question.
