Call Me By Your Name director Luca Guadagnino is to direct Julia Roberts in the “intense dramatic thriller” After The Hunt.
Luca Guadagnino just can’t help himself. In what must be a personal game of project Jenga, he continually adds films to his slate until his tower partly collapses, a few projects go by the wayside and he starts adding more again. Let’s recap: This year, Guadagnino has two films releasing. Challengers, the highly-anticipated love triangle tennis drama that was supposed to release last year before the Hollywood strikes upended everything. Challengers is slated to release later next month, but Guadagnino also has Queer on the way later this year too. That sounds equally promising given that Guadagnino is directing Daniel Craig in an adaptation of the William Burroughs book of the same name. That one shot last year and is set to release sometime this year (we think).
There was the planned Audrey Hepburn biopic starring Rooney Mara which is sadly no more, or at least that was the case the last we heard. The director was also attached to a Scarface remake, but has reportedly exited that one too. Then there’s a sequel to Call Me By Your Name and an adaptation of Lord Of The Flies that are said to be in the works, although we have no idea whether they will actually happen. Then last week Guadagnino added an adaptation of Pier Vittorio Tondelli’s Italian cult novel Separate Rooms to his Jenga tower.
But that was last week. This week Deadline has announced that Guadagnino is now set to direct Julia Roberts in the thriller After The Hunt for Amazon MGM. According to the outlet, ‘the film is an intense dramatic thriller about a college professor (Roberts) who finds herself at a personal and professional crossroads when a star pupil levels an accusation against one of her colleagues and a dark secret from her own past threatens to come to light.’
According to the report, Amazon was able to leverage its existing relationship with Guadagnino to land the package of Roberts, the spec script by debut screnwriter Leah Garrett and the man himself. Interest was said to be high and we can easily imagine that was the case. After all, Guadagnino is the filmmaker behind Challengers, one of this year’s buzziest films, while Roberts starred in last year’s Leave The World Behind which became one of Netflix’s most watched films in the history of the platform.
That’s all we know right now, but we could see After The Hunt getting fast-tracked by the studio. Where that leaves Guadagnino’s other projects we don’t yet know, but when that slate of his does finally form into an orderly fashion, we’ll be sure to let you know.
