David Fincher's next gig, following Facebook app The Social Network which he's just started shooting, looks set to be The Reincarnation of Peter Proud. It'll re-team the director with Seven's writer Andrew Kevin Walker, who will adapt the novel by Max Ehrlich.
The 35-year-old supernatural thriller involves a university lecturer's attempts to prove he's the reincarnation of somebody who died shortly before he was born, and to solve the mystery of his murder, for which the killer was never caught. It was filmed once before: a 1975 Bing Crosby production by J Lee Thompson, starring Margot Kidder and Michael Sarrazin, and adapted by Ehrlich himself.
We all know David Fincher's stellar trajectory from Alien 3 to Benjamin Button, but Walker's path has been rockier. He followed Seven with the dodgy 8mm (heavily rewritten by Joel Schumacher) and Tim Burton's awesome Sleepy Hollow, but then, through uncredited rewrites (Fight Club) and unproduced scripts (Silver Surfer, Batman vs. Superman) more or less dropped off the radar until the new version of The Wolf Man.
But Walker's dark sensibility is a perfect match for the material here, and an official reunion with Fincher is undoubtedly A Good Thing.
That title has such a familiar ring to it though. What other The Something of Someone Someone titles lie in Fincher's future?