Having completed his “clusterfuck trilogy,” Jeremy Saulnier has hit the big time: Netflix, baby! The Calgary Herald have learned the Blue Ruin and Green Room writer-director will, just next month, begin shooting Hold the Dark, which finds him adapting William Giraldi‘s novel — fitting material, if we’re to believe claims that it’s “spectacularly violent” and “brutal” work. The mass-reaching distributor have reportedly agreed to back the project, but don’t get too excited just yet: despite a close start date, they’ve yet to make any official announcement. [Consequence of Sound]
Looking over a synopsis of Giraldi’s novel, one imagines the film will be a particularly big undertaking for one who’s made their bones with small-scale thrillers, which is to say nothing of reported plans to film Iraq War sequences in Morocco. Read below:
At the start of another pitiless winter, wolves have taken three children from the remote Alaskan village of Keelut, including the six-year-old son of Medora and Vernon Slone. Wolf expert Russell Core is called in to investigate these killings and discovers an unholy truth harbored by Medora before she disappears. When her husband returns home to discover his boy dead and his wife missing, he begins a maniacal pursuit that cuts a bloody swath across the frozen landscape. With the help of a local police detective, Core attempts to find Medora before her husband does, setting in motion a deadly chain of events in this “chilling, mysterious, and completely engaging novel” (Tim O’Brien) that marks the arrival of a major American writer.
Meanwhile, there’s come word that Michael Dougherty will take the director’s chair from Gareth Edwards and helm Godzilla 2, which he’d already been tapped to co-write with Zach Shields. He, too, will be face a sized-up scale; previous feature-directing efforts are seasonal horror pictures Trick ‘r Treat and Krampus. He might have some time to figure it out, though — the film won’t open until March 22, 2019. [Variety]