Wilbur and Orville Wright are heroes to aviation fans; Tom Hanks is a hero to everyone else. It makes all kinds of sense, then, for the latter to be helping shepherd the former to the small screen in an HBO miniseries entitled The Wright Brothers. According to Deadline, that’s what happening, with Hanks and Gary Goetzman’s (pictured) Playtone marque picking up the rights to a new David McCullough book about the fathers of flight.
Pulitzer Prize-winner McCullough wrote the book on which the Paul Giamatti-starring historical drama John Adams was based. This time the narrative follows two ambitious dreamers who earn money repairing bikes in an Ohio shops to fund their hobby. That hobby? Building flying machines. But are they just early 20th century Icaruses or can they prove the naysayers wrong and take to the skies above North Carolina’s Outer Banks in the sort of flimsy contraption even Terry-Thomas’ Sir Percy Ware-Armitage would raise a bushy eyebrow at?
Of course, we know the answer to that – if you *don’t *know the answer to that, to the back of the class please – but it’ll all be in the telling and HBO rarely messes that part up.
Working together under their Playtone banner, Hanks and Goetzman have executive-produced John Adams, The Pacific and Olive Kitteridge, among others, for HBO. Playtone also has My Big Fat Greek Wedding 2 in the pipeline, with the original cast reunited for more marital merriment 15 years on from the first film.