Edgar Wright has written and directed four movies (not including his first feature, A Fistful of Fingers, which didn’t debut in the United States until 20 years after its London premiere), and all of them — Shaun of the Dead, Hot Fuzz, Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, and The World’s End — are very good to great. He’ll be five-for-five when Baby Driver (our review) comes out on June 28, or nearly two months before the film’s original release date. The car-caper was the talk of South by Southwest, for good reason: it’s stylish, funny, and boasts a killer (Queen) soundtrack. In other words, it’s an Edgar Wright movie.
He won’t have time to take a long victory lap, though. Wright already has his next two movies lined up: the “dark and shadowy yet comedic” Shadows, and Grasshopper Jungle, based on Andrew A. Smith’s YA novel of the same name. The story follows two high school boys, one of whom is bi and sexually attracted to the other (and his girlfriend), who unleash an army of six-foot-tall praying mantises, triggering the apocalypse. Y’know, typical high school stuff.
“New Regency is in final negotiations to pick up the project,” according to the Hollywood Reporter, “winning a rights war that included Netflix as a competitor, among several other companies.” Scott Rosenberg, who wrote Con Air, Kangaroo Jack, Gone in Sixty Seconds, and the upcoming Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle and Venom, penned the script. If a movie about big-ass praying mantises and horny teenagers from the guys behind Shaun of the Dead and Kangaroo Jack doesn’t do it for you, nothing will.
(Via the Hollywood Reporter)
