Step right up for another one of those "classic character in modern action adventure" stories: this time THR is reporting that Paramount have picked up a pitch to kick-assify **The Hunchback of Notre Dame{
It says something that the title The Hunchback of Notre Dame is far more recognised than the actual title of Victor Hugo's novel, which is Notre Dame de Paris. There have been at least a dozen film versions before: Lon Chaney, Charles Laughton, Anthony Quinn and Anthony Hopkins have all played the misshapen bellringer Quasimodo in various projects, and Tom Hulce voiced him for the 1996 Disney cartoon. But there's never quite been a really faithful adaptation of Hugo's bleak source material, in which, in a spoilerific nutshell, practically everyone ends up dead.
No matter though, because what we apparently need is a "high concept action adventure, mixing original ideas with the framework of the traditional Hunchback story". That framework is presumably the matter of Esmerelda's being framed for murder, and the love quadrangle of Esmerelda, captain of the guard Pheobus, lust-maddened archdeacon Frollo, and Quasimodo himself. But a romp "in the vein of the Pirates of the Caribbean movies" would need to broaden the canvas from the immediate environs of the cathedral, where the original story is entirely set.
The specific details are all hush-hush at the moment, and the top secret pitch is by newbies Willie Block and Jake Emmanuel, whose action script Fuck You, I Win was popular around Hollywood for a while. Lorenzo di Bonaventura (Transformers) is producing. Elsewhere in the updated-classics line-up, Sherlock Holmes 2 is on the way, and Francis Lawrence's Marco Polo, Paul WS Anderson's Three Musketeers, Guy Ritchie's King Arthur, Moby Dick, Captain Nemo, Moses and** Leonardo da Vinci **are all being talked up as potentially incoming. If one of them bombs, the rest will probably go away.