I know most of you were unaware that there was an auction for the rights to John Wyndham’s classic The Day of the Triffids going on last night, because you were busy watching the baseball playoffs.
For those who missed it, Deadline has the exclusive: Mandate Pictures (Drag Me To Hell, Juno) won the rights package that includes the original 1951 novel, which has been adapted a few times already in various forms. Mandate was bidding for Sam Raimi, who really wants to direct his own version about the alien plant invaders who destroy people, as the 1962 film was a childhood favorite of his.
So with the rights now in Mandate’s stable and Raimi eager to direct, step 2 will be getting a script together that everyone can agree on – and the list of producers already attached to Triffids is long to begin with, including Don Murphy, Susan Montford, Mark Gordon and now Raimi and Rob Tapert.
Hopefully by the time it’s passed through the sieve of producer notes and story ideas, the final draft (and more importantly the film) will still retain some of the creepiness and paranoia that helped make the book timeless.
10 comments
The story won't work in contemporary America. Set in in England, or set it in the American past. It will be stupid in contemporary America.
The playoffs are happening? Man, I love knowing fuck all about sports (well, any of the ones that don't involve getting punched/kicked in the face).
Lord knows we've had enough retellings of that story in the past 50 years, and I don't think we need another, but in Raimi's hands this could be all kinds of WIN
The movie wasn't great. Not least of all because they made the Triffids alien plants instead of genetically engineered. That kills some part of the human hubris element.
Hopefully Raimi doesn't love it too much.
If Raimi wants to remake this, great. Certainly couldn't be any worse than M. Night Shyamalan's Day of the Triffids.
it's about time for a really decent John Wyndham adaptation. His stuff was all kinds of brilliant. I remember being completely blown away by The Chrysalids when I read it and wondering why it was never made into a movie. Day of the Triffids is still my fave though (and one I still read occasionally twenty odd years after I first read it). And it needs to be set in the past because the idea of the world dragging themselves away from the fucking TV or Internet to watch a meteorstorm is frankly ludicrous now. Why watch some once in a lifetime celestial event that when the Kardashians is on?
@#4: Huh? In the book they're not man-made. They find them in the Amazon then farm them. It's not a Frankenstein analogue.
So it turns out that the original TRIFFIDS is just abysmal. Really. It sucks like a ten-penny whore. So this is one remake that really doesn't upset me at all, especially if it gets Raimi to do his horror thing again. (But then, what are the chances of Raimi actually making this? How many "next projects" does he have going right now–fifteen? Or have I forgotten one?)
Well, I guess I saw one of the series as it was multi-part and set in England, so I cannot imagine that is the movie this story is referring to. While the series was tolerable, I think the concept has a lot of room to make a good movie … like a Zombie flick, but with plants. They oughta make a movie about "The Fungus" book by Harry Adam Night … that is a nasty read and would be something that has not been put on the screen before!
Definitely a zombie movie without zombies. Besides, the main character belongs to the unreliable narrator kind, one who shares his own theories on what might have happened, and we (as readers) are never given a definite answer. Triffids might be alien, genetically engineered, or just both of them. "They" might be behind the meteor shower, or just be the logical next step after such an accident. Wyndham gives many hints and pointers on the subject of the triffids, but it all becomes secondary to his ultimate achievement, which is creating a believable zombie scenario set up in the 50s.
TV, Internet, modern energy backup systems, and many other technical advances (and social changes) since then should rule out a straight adaptation set in modern days, unless the book went through some non trivial changes which might eventually make the adaptation quite irrelevant, beyond the obvious name recognition.
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