When Empire heard this morning that Clint Eastwood is all set to direct Angelina Jolie in The Changeling, our first thought was, ‘horror remakes are going up in the world’.
However, the newly-announced project – set up at Universal and Imagine Entertainment under the auspices of uber-producer Brian Grazer – isn’t a redo of the extraordinarily creepy George C. Scott fright flick, but instead is an original drama/thriller set in the 1920s.
Jolie will star as a woman whose son is kidnapped, then returned to her. However – dum da daaaaaa! – she begins to suspect that the kid somehow isn’t hers. Rather than flying down Horror Avenue, though, she then begins to conduct her own investigation, which leads to uncovering corruption in the LAPD. And if you think it all sounds a little out there, the movie is reportedly based on true-life events that actually happened! Egads!
A few years ago, we might have expected this to be a pulpy but fun thriller from Eastwood, a la Blood Work or Absolute Power, but now the great man couldn’t point a camera at a blank wall without it being considered for Oscars, so we expect this to be a suitably heavyweight and worthy drama, a la Mystic River, shot in Clint’s trademark austere style.
Certainly, with that pedigree, this could be one of the front-runners for next year’s Oscars (production will start later in the year, but if you don’t think it’ll be finished in time, you haven’t considered how fast Eastwood can shoot and edit a movie), but at the very least it should be a big gun come 2009. And who knows? Maybe it’ll give Jolie her first shot at Oscar gold since she bagged a li’l gold guy for Girl, Interrupted.
Geek fact: The movie is written by J. Michael Straczynski, who not only possesses the mutant power to bamboozle spell checkers everywhere, but also is famous for creating Babylon 5, and has recently been seen writing The Amazing Spider-Man comic-book.