Anna Kendrick is set to star in Rodney & Sheryl for Netflix, a true crime drama based on the story of Cheryl Bradshaw, a contestant who unwittingly won a date with a serial killer when taking part in a TV game show in 1978. Netflix have snapped up the package, which is to be directed by Chloe Okuno, that takes a dramatic look at how unassuming Rodney Alcala appeared on and won the popular show The Dating Game while in the middle of a killing spree that included five women and the attempted killing of a 12 year old girl.

Clips of the show are available on YouTube, and you can watch these below to see just how creepy the whole thing is once you know what Alcala was capable of. You can also get a sense of whom Anna Kendrick will be portraying in the true life crime tale.

Bradshaw put questions to the killer in a bid to work out which contestant she wanted to go on a date with, including asking him "I'm serving you for dinner. What are you called and what do you look like?" Alcana replied that he was "a banana" and that he looked good. When pushed to elaborate, he responded, "Peel me" to laughter from the audience. The quip, and others, were enough for Bradshaw to select him as her man. The movie will focus on the recording of the show and the events that happened around it.

As per the rules of The Dating Game, choosing Alcala as her winner meant that Bradshaw would go on a date with him, thankfully for her under chaperone, but said she was put off him by his strange vibes. You would guess that came from the blood on his hands and the potential that in other circumstances she could have become one of his many victims. While it seems unthinkable for such a thing to happen now, the vetting performed by researchers for the show at the time were more than a little lacking, and without the right background checks being performed it was apparently simple for Alcala's past to remain undiscovered for some time after.

After being arrested and sentenced to death in 1980, Alcala made numerous appeals in the years that followed, but hundreds of photos and keepsakes found in a locker suggested that there were a lot more victims that the police had not uncovered. As DNA technology advanced through the following decades, detectives were able to attribute a total of around 130 killings to Alcala, whose death sentence was indefinitely postponed in 2019 when California issued a suspension of all death penalty cases. The killer is now in a state prison in Corcoran, California, without any chance of ever being released.

The script for the movie, by Ian MacAllister-McDonald, featured in 2017's Black List, an industry-voted collection of the most buzz-worthy scripts that have not been picked up for production, which in the past has included the Spielberg directed Oscar runner, The Post, as well as The Wolf of Wall Street, The Social Network and Lions For Lambs to name a few. With some big films coming from entries on the list, Netflix could once again have struck gold with this one.