I think it’s safe to say that Denis Villeneuve really knocked it out of the park with Blade Runner 2049 this year, just like he did with the equally awesome Arrival in 2016. He’s got plans for a redo of Dune in the future, as well as a new take on the Cleopatra story, which is being scripted by All The Money In The World writer David Scarpa, based on the best-selling biography by Stacy Schiff. Well, rather than some massive sprawling epic, which I’m sure we’ll still get elements of with Villeneuve’s magnificent vision, it sounds like it will be more of a political thriller.
Scarpa spoke with The Hollywood Reporter about the tone of the piece. This sounds intriguing.
“It’s similar [to All the Money in the World] in that there’s a lot of research involved and there’s a question with all that of how do you want to do it and how do you make something new out of it? With Getty, part of the idea was to take two genres we felt we knew, which was the kidnapping genre and what we’ll call the “great man” genre — the Citizen Kane genre — and smash them together and make something new out of them. With Cleopatra … instead of doing the movie as the prestige picture — the three-hour, lots of pageantry, people with fans and English accents and all that stuff — [we] really treat it as a political thriller. Dirty, bloody, lots of people swearing and having sex and all of that other stuff and just treat it as a two-hour, lean, mean political thriller, full of assassinations, etc. Just going the opposite direction from the way we think that movie is going to go.”
We’re expecting Villeneuve to tackle Dune before he gets his hands on Cleopatra, and we’re very much looking forward to what he’s able to do with both. More as it comes in.
