When Gillian Flynn novels hit the screen, it tends to result in something highly watchable. Take, for instance, David Fincher’s big-screen adaptation of Gone Girl, with its stellar casting of Rosamund Pike and Ben Affleck, or HBO’s adaptation of the ultra-dark Sharp Objects, anchored by the ace Amy Adams (and featuring early performances from Sophia Lillis, Eliza Scanlen and Sydney Sweeney). Now, another of Flynn’s novels is being adapted into an HBO series – her Sharp Objects follow-up Dark Places.
The series will see Flynn serve as co-creator, writer, and co-showrunner, working alongside Brett Johnson in all those capacities – while Guerrin Gardner will be co-creator and writer. The show is said to be in early development, so stay tuned for updates of it moving further into the pipeline. The novel was previously adapted as a film by writer-director Gilles Paquet-Brenner in 2015, with Charlize Theron leading the cast, though it went largely under the radar and received mixed reviews.
Here’s the logline of the story: “Libby Day was seven when her mother and two sisters were murdered in the famous 1985 ‘Satan Sacrifice of Kinnakee, Kansas.’ She survived — and famously testified that her teenage brother, Ben, was the killer. Twenty-five years later, a pair of mother/daughter true crime ‘detectives’ locate a grownup Libby and pump her for details, believing that Ben is innocent. Libby, having spent her youth working the talk show circuit, hopes to once again turn a profit off her tragic history: She’ll reconnect with the players from that night and report her findings — for a fee. As Libby’s search takes her from shabby Missouri strip clubs to abandoned Oklahoma tourist traps, the unimaginable truth emerges, and Libby finds herself right back where she started — on the run from a killer.”
Given the success of Gone Girl and Sharp Objects, it’d be great to see another strong adaptation of Flynn’s work. More recently, the author has been working in the film and TV space, co-writing the screenplay for Steve McQueen’s Widows, and overseeing the US adaptation of Utopia before it was cancelled by Prime Video. She’s also working on a fourth novel, finally following up Gone Girl. No pressure, Gillian!