The recent UK miniseries "Red Riding" condensed four lengthy crime novels into three feature-length episodes. Now Columbia Pictures wants to squish everything into a single movie, and the studio is looking to Oscar-winning screenwriter Steven Zaillian ("Schindler's List") to handle that task, according to Variety.
Columbia is also said to be negotiating with Ridley Scott to direct the adaptation, but it's hard to imagine the "Blade Runner" director having room in his pipeline to commit to anymore films. After he finishes his "Robin Hood" movie, Scott is attached to helm the board game-adaptation "Monopoly," the prequel to "Alien" an adaptation of "Brave New World" and his sci-fi pet project "The Forever War."
And he's been offered about 43,968,034,960,394 other gigs in the past year. So, even if Columbia wanted him to merely produce "Red Riding," he would seem to be too busy. This is likely just one of those cases in which a studio wants to reunite successful collaborators, seeing as how Scott has previously directed from two Zaillian scripts ("Hannibal" and "American Gangster").
The "Red Riding" miniseries, which originally aired in the UK back in March, has been making the film festival rounds over the past few months in the form of a trilogy ("Red Riding: 1974:" "Red Riding: 1980;" "Red Riding: 1983"). After receiving much acclaim at Telluride and New York fests, the three episodes are set to be released theatrically by IFC sometime this fall.
The five-hour-plus story involves many characters and deals with serial murders and police corruption. Hollywood's version, which will obviously be set in the U.S. rather than the UK, would do best to only halve the running time (to two and a half hours). It would also be nice if Zaillian can keep the idea of using real-life murder cases as a backdrop for a fictional plot.
"Red Riding" was originally scripted by Tony Grisoni, who also co-wrote the UK miniseries-turned-movie "State of Play," which came out earlier this year to disappointing box office, sparking a discussion about how adults don't go to the movies. Hopefully "Red Riding" won't meet a similar fate.
Have you seen the "Red Riding" series and think it could be sufficiently adapted into a feature film? Would you prefer Ridley Scott directed this movie instead of one of the other projects on his plate?
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