Charles Burns’ graphic novel Black Hole turned teen dreams into an adolescent nightmare. A sexually transmitted virus was being spread and it had the strangest side effects. Dope and Confirmation director Rick Famuyiwa will write and direct the New Regency and Plan B’s film adaptation, according to The Hollywood Reporter.
Black Hole was a 12-issue graphic novel published between 1994 and 2004, and collected in book in 2005. Set in Seattle in the 1970s, it follows a group of teens contract a sexually transmitted disease called “the Bug.” The side effects included mutations like having a second mouth grow on someone’s chin.
“We learn from the outset that a strange plague has descended upon the area’s teenagers, transmitted by sexual contact,” according to the Amazon synopsis.
“The disease is manifested in any number of ways — from the hideously grotesque to the subtle (and concealable) — but once you’ve got it, that’s it. There’s no turning back. As we inhabit the heads of several key characters — some kids who have it, some who don’t, some who are about to get it — what unfolds isn’t the expected battle to fight the plague, or bring heightened awareness to it , or even to treat it. What we become witness to instead is a fascinating and eerie portrait of the nature of high school alienation itself — the savagery, the cruelty, the relentless anxiety and ennui, the longing for escape. And then the murders start.”
A film adaptation of Black Hole, which won the Eisner, Harvey, and Ignatz Awards, has been in the works intermittently since 2005. It was originally supposed to be helmed by Alexandre Aja. Neil Gaiman and Roger Avery, the latter of whom won an Oscar for Pulp Fiction, wrote a screenplay. David Fincher was slated to direct it for Paramount, but dropped out in 2010.
New Regency and Plan B previously partnered on The Big Short, 12 Years A Slave, and the James Gray’s upcoming Ad Astra, which stars Pitt, and Wrong Answer, which was directed and produced by Black Panther director Ryan Coogler, and starred Michael B. Jordan.
More as we get it.