Having racked up a string of successes on the boards, composer and actor Lin-Manuel Miranda is beginning to make a name for himself in the film industry. After producing a portion of the score for Star Wars: The Force Awakens, not to mention landing a star role in Disney’s Mary Poppins Returns, The Hollywood Reporter brings word that Miranda’s Broadway breakout, In the Heights, has found a home at The Weinstein Company.
Nabbing the Toby Award for Best Musical seven years ago, talk of In the Heights gracing the silver screen has been doing the rounds for years, and now the team at Weinstein have made the adaptation official.
Tethered with a production budget in the $15 million ballpark, Miranda remains attached as an executive producer, though whether he will actually headline the musical remains to be seen, particularly considering the actor is now almost ten years older than the character he originally portrayed on stage.
It’s not for want of trying, though; in 2011, a feature film based on In the Heights looked to have set up shop at Universal, before the studio eventually passed on the adaptation. Fast forward to now and The Weinstein’s reworked version will be based on a screenplay by Quiara Alegria Hudes, the writer behind the original stage show. In light of the news, Harvey Weinstein claimed “In the Heights will revolutionize what movie audiences expect from the genre.”
Further down the pipeline for Miranda is Mary Poppins Returns, which will see the composer-actor star opposite Emily Blunt on December 25, 2018.