If you need a reliable TV director, Ken Kwapis seems to be your go-to man, after helming episodes of Malcom in the Middle, The Office Parks and Recreation and many more. While his directorial efforts, from Big Miracle to He’s Just Not That Into, never amount to much (aside from a seminal film from my childhood, Dunston Checks In), he’s about to make quite a different turn for his next project.
Deadline reports his company In Cahoots, has picked up the rights to Diana Wagman‘s dark kidnapper novel The Care And Feeding Of Exotic Pets. While it doesn’t actually release until next month, Kwapis has already gotten into adapting the project and plans to direct the film. Kwapis has begun adapting the book and will direct the film. While I haven’t enjoyed much of his feature work, this sounds like a wild enough story that it at least piques my interest.
Check out the synopsis below thanks to Amazon.
Winnie Parker, mother to an angst-ridden teenage daughter and ex-wife to a successful game show host who left her for a twenty-something contestant, begins a normal day in her hum-drum existence by dropping her car off at the repair shop. After accepting what she believes is a ride to pick up her rental car, Winnie realizes too late that she’s been kidnapped.
What follows is a riveting psychological game of cat and mouse set in the kidnapper’s tropically heated house—kept that way for Cookie, a menacing seven-foot long Iguana headquartered in the kitchen. While desperately seeking to escape—which leads to several violent clashes with her increasingly unstable kidnapper—Winnie also tries to understand why she was taken captive. Is her kidnapper merely seeking a ransom or does he have something more sinister in mind? Does he know that Winnie’s mother is an Oscar-winning actress? Or did he connect her with Jonathan, her famous ex-husband? When the truth reveals itself, Winnie is not only forced to fight for her life, but must also protect the lives of those she loves from the kidnapper’s deranged master plan.
Have you read the novel? Do you think Kwapis fits the material?