Another Hollywood A-lister is making the jump to the small screen, with word today that Amy Adams has signed on to star in a TV adaptation of Gillian Flynn’s Sharp Objects.
Dallas Buyers Club director Jean Marc-Vallee is also coming aboard to direct the buzzy series, which has been in the works over at Entertainment One since July of 2014.
Marti Noxon (UnREAL) is attached to script, exec-produce, and serve as showrunner, while Flynn, Vallee, and Blumhouse Productions’ Jason Blum rank among the various high-profile EPs (Blumhouse optioned Sharp Objects years before Flynn’s Gone Girl caught fire).
The book focuses on a reporter named Camille Preaker (Adams) who, shortly after a brief stay in a psych hospital, is tasked with traveling to her hometown to cover the shocking murders of two young girls. Returning home after years of estrangement from her hypochondriac mother and 13-year-old half-sister, she slowly becomes aware of troubling links between the victims and her mystery-laden past.
As the commercial and critical success of House of Cards, True Detective, and Fargo (among many others) has proven, all it takes is the right project to lure a big name to TV, and the twisty plot on display here certainly lends itself to a compelling, serialized adaptation.
There’s no network attached yet, but with Adams and Marc-Vallee on board, interest is understandably high. Expect HBO to make a play for the series, especially given how committed the network has been in the past to working with Flynn. The author had previously been set to reteam with Gone Girl director David Fincher to write an HBO adaptation of the British series Utopia, a conspiracy thriller, but it ended up collapsing over budget disagreements. It’s hard to imagine that network’s execs not regarding Sharp Objects with some serious curiosity, especially now that it’s snagged not one but two major Hollywood talents.
The Amazon synopsis for Flynn’s book can be found below:
Fresh from a brief stay at a psych hospital, reporter Camille Preaker faces a troubling assignment: she must return to her tiny hometown to cover the murders of two preteen girls. For years, Camille has hardly spoken to her neurotic, hypochondriac mother or to the half-sister she barely knows: a beautiful thirteen-year-old with an eerie grip on the town. Now, installed in her old bedroom in her family’s Victorian mansion, Camille finds herself identifying with the young victims—a bit too strongly. Dogged by her own demons, she must unravel the psychological puzzle of her own past if she wants to get the story—and survive this homecoming.