David Benioff and D.B. Weiss, the former Game Of Thrones showrunners, have set up a new project. It’s not at Netflix, where they recently signed a massive overall deal. And it’s not the Star Wars trilogy they were going to helm, they dropped out of that. Instead, it’s an untitled thriller inspired by the graphic novel Lovecraft by Keith Giffen at Warner Bros.
Lovecraft is a fictionalised take on the life of cosmic-horror author H.P. Lovecraft in which the unspeakable monsters in his stories were real. The movie will be set in 1920 within the Cthulhu mythos. Benioff and Weiss will direct while Phil Hay and Matt Manfredi (Aeon Flux, Ride Along) will write the script. Karyn Kusama, director of Destroyer and The Invitation, will executive produce.
What’s fascinating is that Benioff and Weiss were criticised by Thrones fans for removing the weirder Lovecraftian aspects of George R.R. Martin‘s A Song Of Ice And Fire for the TV adaptation. Now they’re going completely the other way and making a film that will presumably have about as much Lovecraft as possible.
It’s also a surprising announcement considering that they dropped out of their Star Wars trilogy due to their Netflix deal, claiming “there are only so many hours in the day”, but now here they are announcing another project alongside that deal. Perhaps the mutual departure from Star Wars wasn’t the case, but it was framed that way to save face.
The duo went from respected showrunners to heavily maligned ones after season 8 of Game Of Thrones was met with derision. We’ll see how much of that fan backlash carries over to other projects.
#Peace.Love.Lovecraft
