Yesterday was something of a good news, bad news day for David Fincher.
The good news was that, obviously, his latest movie, The Curious Case Of Benjamin Button, garnered an astonishing 13 Oscar nominations.
The bad news? The movie he was shaping up to direct next, Ness, might be in jeopardy, after it emerged that Paramount had let the rights to Torso, the graphic novel on which it is based, expire.
Written by Brian Michael Bendis and Mark Andreyko, Torso tells the true story of what happened when Eliot Ness, of Untouchables fame, became Cleveland Safety Director, at around the same time that a psycho known as the Cleveland Torso Murderer began to wreak havoc, bumping off various people between 1934 and 1938, leaving only their torsos. Ness threw himself into the investigation.
Ness, as it seems to have been retitled, had Matt Damon circling the lead role, and we were darned excited about it, given the obvious similarities with Fincher’s Zodiac.
Yet Paramount, which acquired the rights in 2006 when Fincher was already on board, had an opportunity last month to renew their option on the rights – but given that that would have involved buying the rights outright, the studio passed.
The rights have since reverted back to Bendis and Andreyko – but to their credit, Paramount, which still owns the rights to Ehren Kruger’s screenplay, has entered into discussions with them to strike a new deal to option the rights.
So maybe it’s much ado about nothing, given that the likely outcome is that the rights will come back to Paramount, who might not want to run the risk of it ending up at another studio. And then Fincher can get on with the job of making the movie, although it might be interesting to know what his reaction was upon finding out that the rights had been allowed to lapse.