Leonardo DiCaprio and Ridley Scott are apparently gearing up for a new take on Brave New World, the dystopian Aldous Huxley science fiction novel of 1931, which gives us the always-welcome opportunity to make our headline a Shakespearean misquote. We're well cultured, we are.
The Huxley novel is one that Scott's been talking about for years, and he's now producing the project at Universal, along with DiCaprio's Appian Way. They've got Apocalypto screenwriter Farhad Safinia lined up to adapt the book, something which has proved problematic in the past.
One of those sci-fi stories more focused on satire and world-building than plot-telling, Brave New World is set 500 years in the future, where humans are artificially bred into castes, which determine their intelligence, height and social prospects. They are dependent on a drug called soma and sexually promiscuous, although love and family are socially taboo.
The novel's protagonist, Bernard, is an Alpha Plus caste member wih an inferiority complex who develops an inappropriate fixation on Beta Plus caste member Lenina. He tries to impress her on a trip to the Savage reservation where people still live normally, instead finding John, the son of an Alpha once exiled there and returning him to their civilisation as a cause celebre.
While Scott and DiCaprio are only signed to produce at the moment, it's being speculated that they may direct and star (respectively). While Bernard's is the biggest role, John might be an easier sell for a movie star like DiCaprio, since unlike Bernard he's not a bit of a dick.
But this is an interesting proposition: probably because most of the characters are so unpleasant, the book has never been shot for the big screen before, and it is an enduring classic. We'll keep an eye out for further movement on this one.