Whatever Happened to Gillian Flynn?

I devoured Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl when it came out and loved it so much that I immediately read her two earlier novels, Dark Places and Sharp Objects. Then the David Fincher-directed Gone Girl arrived, and suddenly, Flynn wasn’t just a hugely popular novelist, but her works were being adapted into films and television shows (often by Flynn herself). Dark Places became a (mediocre) Charlize Theron movie, and Sharp Objects turned into an excellent Amy Adams miniseries.

With that momentum, Flynn wrote the brilliantly performed (and decently written) Viola Davis ensemble Widows in 2018, then moved on to the Prime Video miniseries Utopia. I thought that show would be huge and maybe even resurrect the fading career of John Cusack.

It mostly came and went. Honestly, it wasn’t very good. I didn’t even finish.

That was 2020. We basically haven’t heard from Gillian Flynn since. Not that she hasn’t been working. She wrote or is writing the screenplay for Tim Burton’s remake of Attack of the Fifty Foot Woman, and she was attached to Strangers, a retelling of Alfred Hitchcock’s Strangers on a Train. It’s unclear whether or how far either project has moved forward.

Now she’s teaming with Darren Aronofsky, whose latest, Austin Butler’s Caught Stealing, underwhelmed at the box office (though it’s doing well on Netflix). She’s writing an “erotic thriller” for Aronofsky, which feels right up both of their alleys. Plot details, however, are under wraps.

As for Flynn’s fourth novel? That’s still a work in progress, too. She’s described it as a “character-driven psychological thriller” in the vein of Gone Girl, but she’s also admitted there’s enormous pressure to follow up that success. I hope she doesn’t George RR Martin it. Honestly, it might help to rip the bandage off, turn in a mediocre novel, and get it out of the way so the pressure lifts for whatever comes next.