Hollywood can’t leave well enough alone when it adapts things. Leslie Dixon, writer of Hairspray and the forthcoming Birds remake, bent over backwards to acquire the rights to The Dark Fields, a 2002 scifi novel by Alan Glynn. The book is about ‘MDT-48, an illegal, nearly unknown designer medication guaranteed to spike intelligence and personality in mere minutes’ (Publisher’s Weekly). The main character is a Manhattan divorcee who gets addicted to the pill and his rise and eventual fall. So of course they cast Shia LaBeouf in that role.

I like Shia, but it’s just so funny that someone would read a book about an older guy and say, ‘This boyish early 20s guy would be perfect for this role!’ Dixon, who is also producing, has apparently solved that problem in her screenplay, which will be directed by Neil Burger, late of The Illusionist. There’s no start date yet – Shia still has to shoot Transformers 2 in the very near future – but The Dark Fields could be LaBeouf’s next project after that.