This Is Such a Great Idea, I Can’t Believe Someone Didn’t Think of It Already
Oh Wait, They Did / Daniel Carlson
Trade News | February 17, 2009 | Comments (48)
So, Elton John’s production company Rocket Pictures is going to work on Pride and Predator, to be directed by Will Clark, who co-wrote with Andrew Kemble and John Pape. I’ve had to decode the logline from that learning-impaired kind of writing used in Variety — ”U prexy ankles for Mouse House,” etc. — but here’s the basics: Clark’s script takes Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice and tosses in aliens, who crash their ship into old England and start slaughtering people. Rocket’s David Furnish said of the project, “It felt like a fresh and funny way to blow apart the done-to-death Jane Austen genre by literally dropping this alien into the middle of a costume drama, where he stalks and slashes to horrific effect.”
Funny, yes. Fresh … well, the hitch is that there’s already a novel called Pride and Prejudice and Zombies coming out in April, and it’s the same damn idea. Author Seth Grahame-Smith takes Austen’s original text and adds new scenes of zombie violence. Yes, one has aliens while the other has zombies, but modern-day monsters invading the same classic story? Come on. So instead of just kvetching about how Hollywood is so stupid and self-cannibalizing that it always produces the same two movies at once (e.g., Armageddon and Deep Impact), on top of that you can voice your complaints screenwriters can’t even come up with new ideas and instead have to try and reinvent old ones.
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Comments
Posted by: Robert at February 17, 2009 11:01 AM
It felt like a fresh and funny way to blow apart the done-to-death Jane Austen genre
I stopped reading here. How can Jane Austen be done to death? There's a reason people keep revisiting her work, and it isn't because a gone was put to their head. Think before you speak, people.
I'm all for Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, as it may get more people to actually read Pride and Prejudice. But Pride and Predator? I'll take a shot in the dark and say it probably isn't going to have people scrambling to look up Austen's novel, let alone watch a right proper BBC period drama.