Chiwetel Ejiofor Is Going To Star In A TV Remake Of A Classic David Bowie Film

It’s been five years since we lost David Bowie, and while he’s best known for his many classic albums, he also found time to appear in a handful of sometimes excellent movies. Among his finest big screen turns — and one of the only ones in which he was a lead, not a scene-stealing supporting player — was 1976’s The Man Who Fell to Earth, a mind-blowing, deeply sad sci-fi, in which he played an alien who comes to Earth in a failed attempt to save his home planet.

Now that film has become the latest in the remake carousel. As per Entertainment Weekly, Paramount+ has greenlit a limited TV series version, which will star Chiwetel Ejiofor as the extraterrestrial loner. The showrunners are Alex Kurtzman — the big Hollywood player behind the Star Trek movie reboot — and Jenny Lumet, daughter of Dog Day Afternoon director Sidney and herself the writer of the Anne Hathaway drama Rachel Getting Married.

Mind you, this The Man Who Fell to Earth not necessarily a straight remake. It will simply be another adaptation of the novel by Walter Tevis, author of such novels as The Hustler (and its sequel The Color of Money) as well as The Queen’s Gambit, which was turned into a much-watched Netflix show. The book is a bit different from the 1976 movie, which is singular in its artiness and would be hard for anyone to redo. Still, good on Ejiofor, who gets to step into the same shoes as The Thin White Duke.

(Via EW)

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