Resting on laurels is for suckers.
It’s been four excruciatingly long years since The World’s End, the last film from Edgar Wright, which in Edgar-Wright-fan years is like a century. He was set up to direct Ant-Man, but we all know how that turned out. And while you might think Wright spent some of his time post-Marvel licking that particular wound, you’d be wrong, because Edgar Wright knows that living well is the best revenge, so in the last few years he’s been busy gearing up for not one but two films. Immediately after Ant-Man Wright started developing Baby Driver, which is at long last completed, set for a June 28 release, and so far is garnering the best reviews of the director’s career. At the same time he was starting Baby Driver back in 2014, though, there was another project the director was kicking around, an adaptation of the novel Grasshopper Jungle, and we’ve learned this week from THR that not only it GJ going to be Wright’s Baby Driver follow-up, it’s already found a distributor in New Regency, who outbid a host of candidates for the rights, including Netflix. Wright and his producing partner Nira Park are producing, along with Scott Rosenberg and Matt Tolmach, the team behind upcoming tentpoles Jumanji and Venom.
The novel, by Andrew Smith, is a YA apocalypse novel with giant bugs. Really. Dig the synopsis:
Simmering within Ealing, Iowa, is a deadly genetically engineered plague capable of unleashing unstoppable soldiers – six-foot-tall praying mantises with insatiable appetites for food and sex. No one knows it, of course, until Austin and his best friend Robby accidentally release it on the world. An ever-growing plague of giant, flesh-hungry insects is bad enough, but Austin is also up to his eyeballs in sexual confusion – is he in love with Robby or his girlfriend, Shann? Both of them make him horny, but most things do. In an admittedly futile attempt to capture the truth of his history, painfully honest Austin narrates the events of the apocalypse intermingled with a detailed account of the “connections that spiderweb through time and place,” leading from his great-great-great-grandfather Andrzej in Poland to Shann’s lucky discovery of an apocalypse-proof bunker in her new backyard.
Excited yet? Sounds like The Dreamers meets Attack the Block, an off-kilter combination I for one am all in favor of. There’s no timeline in place as yet, but considering the business-end of things is taken care of, hopefully we’ll see this one by the end of 2018.
Over in our corner of the internet we had a lot of really interesting posts go up yesterday, including a look at the cast of Crazy Rich Asians, an examination of the ancient wisdom in Spike Jonze’s Her, a remembrance of Jason X on its 15th anniversary, 22 things learned from The Greasy Strangler commentary, and the newest episode of the Shot by Shot cinematography podcast, all about Drive.
And lastly, take a look at five of the most popular shots we tweeted over the last 24 hours. Want more? You know where to find us.
Related Topics: Culture, One Perfect Shot
