Netflix has purchased Christian Bale‘s upcoming horror thriller The Pale Blue Eye for a record fee at the virtual European Film Market.

The rights to the film were purchased for $55million (£39m) by the streaming service, reported by Deadline as the highest fee ever for a worldwide deal at the EFM.

Scott Cooper will write and direct the Edgar Allen Poe-inspired film, which is based on a 2003 novel by Louis Bayard.

The story, set in 1830, will see Bale star as a veteran detective investigating a murder, before taking on an assistant to help him with the case. The assistant in question is Edgar Allen Poe.

Production on the film is set to begin later this year.

Elsewhere at Netflix, Steven Spielberg and Stranger Things creators the Duffer Brothers are set to adapt Stephen King’s The Talisman for the streaming service.

The fantasy epic was first published in 1984, and tells the story of a 12-year-old boy who goes on a journey to save his dying mother. Spielberg has held the rights to the project for over 40 years, purchasing them in 1982, two years before the 1,000 page book was even published.

Meanwhile, last week thousands of Netflix users reported outages, with outage tracker site DownDetector reporting 1,602 reports of users unable to stream content.

Last year, Christian Bale revealed that a number of his American Psycho castmates thought that he was “the worst actor they’d ever seen” during filming.