Inde Navarrette is having quite the season! After being the breakout star of stealth smash Obsession, she was announced as Rogue in Marvel’s upcoming X-Men line-up. Now she has another piece of work in the pipeline.
Navarrette is to star in The Waffle House Index, from Brad Pitt’s Plan B Pictures and Apple Studios. What the hell is the Waffle House Index? Well, it turns out it is a real thing.
The Waffle House Index is a metric named after the Southern US restaurant chain Waffle House known for its 24-hour, 365-day service. Because the restaurant chain is always open, except in extreme circumstances, it has given rise to an informal but useful metric to determine the severity of a storm and the likely scale of assistance required for disaster recovery.
The metric was coined by Craig Fugate in August 2004 after Hurricane Charley. He was leading the Florida Division of Emergency Management. The metric is unofficially used by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) to inform disaster response.
The index is based on Waffle House’s reputation for strong disaster preparedness and for staying open during extreme weather or reopening quickly afterward. As Fugate puts it:
“If you get there and the Waffle House is closed? That’s really bad…”
The index ranges from if the local Waffle House is open with a full menu, all the way through various states of restriction, down to full closure. So, now you know.
Lois Paxton is slated to direct, and Andrew Nunnelly penned the film that follows a character named Jane who works the graveyard shift at a Waffle House. What begins as a regular day progressively gets worse and worse with one stormy apocalyptic event following another.
Nunnelly’s script landed on The Black List in 2025. Navarrette will also serve as executive producer. The report was confirmed in Deadline.
