Given his success producing The Help and before that directing the first two entries of an obscure franchise about a boy wizard or some such thing, you can’t blame Chris Columbus for looking to bestselling books to fuel his future movie projects. He’s already got more than one on the go, but has now thrown Kristin Hannah’s Home Front into his personal development boiling pot.
Hannah’s novel, which has sat high on the US book charts for 16 weeks now, takes a look at how war affects an ordinary American family. But unlike many combat stress stories, this is told from the point of view of a woman who combines her life as a wife and mother with that of a Blackhawk helicopter pilot in the National Guard. The story charts what happens when she’s called up to serve in Iraq.
“I was blown away by this book, I simply could not put it down,” Columbus says in a press release tracked down by Deadline’s advanced news infantry. “It told the story about the cost of war from a completely unique perspective: what happens when a wife and mother is called into action and how her family adjusts to life without her, and to a changed life upon her return. Home Front not only portrays the great sacrifices our military makes for us, but depicts so powerfully the hidden sacrifices their families make as well.”
It’s still at an early stage, and there’s no writer or cast attached yet. But Home Front Is not the only Hannah book that’s now making its way through the tangled thickets of studio developments. SPB Productions has nabbed the rights to The Things We Do For Love, about a destitute, pregnant 17-year-old and the tough choice she faces. That one has no director or writer yet, but it’s being set up as a possible starring project for Abigail Breslin…