Did Twentieth Century Fox just assemble its next Gone Girl? With the news Wednesday that Amy Adams is taking the lead role in the studios adaptation of the New York Times best-seller The Woman in the Window, Fox is cranking up the prestige factor for the hot project, which could be 2019s answer to David Finchers massively successful Gillian Flynn adaptationa film that nabbed $168 million in domestic box office and an Oscar nomination for its star, Rosamund Pike, four years ago.
Based on the best-selling novel by book-editor-turned-author Daniel Mallory (writing under the pseudonym A.J. Finn), The Woman in the Window is yet another novel in the long line of unreliably narrated stories about flawed women whose best-laid plans are destroyed by years of disappointment and mismanaged aspirations. Thank novelist Flynn for beginning the trend, and a slew of others who followed suit (Paula Hawkins, Liane Moriarty, and many more). Mallory himself has readily admitted that without Gone Girl, there would have been no The Woman in the Window. But there is something about this particular noir storywhich also finds strong antecedents in Alfred Hitchcocks Rear Windowthat attracted top filmmaking talent.
Fox 2000 Pictures, the Twentieth Century Fox unit best known for its sure-footed adaptations of best-selling novels (Fight Club, Hidden Figures), nabbed the book nearly two years prior to publication. Producer Scott Rudin (Lady Bird) joined soon after, and hired Pulitzer Prizewinning playwright Tracy Letts (August: Osage County) to pen the script. (Sometime-actor Letts also played Saoirse Ronans dad in Lady Bird.)
According to Fox 2000 president Elizabeth Gabler, the studio green-lit the film based on Lettss first draft. That attracted Darkest Hour director Joe Wright to helm the film. Wright has a penchant for historical dramas (Pride and Prejudice, Anna Karenina, Atonement), and had been wanting to do a modern-day thriller set in New York. The only thing missing was a leading lady.
Despite gobs of attention from eager agents around town, this Cinderella story would only be complete if Mallorywho initially hid his identity from his bosses at William Morrow publishing (the house that bought his manuscript)could get the woman he envisioned to play the Merlot-imbibing, pill-popping agoraphobic child psychologist Dr. Anna Fox. That, of course, was Adams, whom we next will see go pitch-black this summer in the HBO series Sharp Objects, based on . . . you guessed it, Flynns first novel of the same name.
Adams, according to Gabler, was also Wrights first choice. Her age is perfect, her vulnerability is perfect. You believe completely she could be a psychologist. Plus, shes also very accessible to audiences, said Gabler. Shes done so many genres of film that her fan base is very diverse, both age-wise and by gender. Its hard to find all that punch in one person.
Indeed, Adamss dance card is full for the foreseeable future. After toggling the last few years between art-house fare (Arrival, Nocturnal Animals) and big-budget blockbusters as Lois Lane in DC Comics Justice League films, Adams is switching it up: after she plays damaged journalist Camille Preaker in Sharp Objects, she will inhabit the role of Lynne Cheney opposite her American Hustle co-star, Christian Bale, in Adam McKays Dick Cheney biopic, due out this fall. And in addition to The Woman in the Window, she is scheduled to reprise her role as the singing, dancing Giselle in the Disney sequel to Enchanted, Disenchanted, next year.
We caught up with Gabler in the middle of her own nostalgic reverie, on her way back from Las Vegas after witnessing what could be Foxs final presentation at the theater-owners convention known as CinemaCon as the studio readies itself for a sale to Disney. Gabler, a 30-year veteran with Fox, is hopeful that Disney will maintain the 85-year-old Fox brand. She finds comfort that even with so much uncertainty the studio is still making movies.
This project, in particular, she finds special. In the book, Anna Fox, following a mysterious, traumatic event, becomes a recluse who takes to spying on her neighbors with a camera outfitted with a powerful zoom lens. In the course of her voyeurism, she may or may not have witnessed a brutal murder. Though Gabler acknowledges character similarities between it and Gone Girl, she believes The Woman in the Window is more similar to the Adrian Lyne movies of the 1980s and early aughts.
Anna Fox lives like people we know, in a brownstone in Harlema professional dealing with issues in the way many people deal with issues, she added. Look at Unfaithful: [Diane Lanes character] was a married woman who lived in a house, who got up in the morning, went to restaurants with her friends, and did everything people normally do. This is not some weird, dark underbelly of a world we are living in. It feels commonplace, and then things happen that are extraordinary and then scary.
Gabler has been shepherding best-sellers to the big screen for years, from the prestige (Life of Pi, Bridge of Spies) to the populist (Diary of a Wimpy Kid, Percy Jackson & the Olympians: The Lightning Thief). She wont quantify where The Woman in the Window falls, but before boarding a plane to Vancouverwhere her other best-seller, The Art of Racing in the Rain, is filming with Milo Ventimiglia and director Simon Curtis (Goodbye Christopher Robin)she does give a hint.
I just make the movies I fall in love with, she said, before adding that production on The Woman in the Window will begin in August with a fall 2019 releasejust in time for awards season.
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