Zombies invade Pride and Prejudice

[scouse mac]

This is an extract from an article in todays Sunday Times.

Im struggling to picture the pitch to studio execs but at least it promises to be a bit different:

IT is a truth commercially acknowledged that Jane Austen’s high-spirited heroines can be recast as Hollywood brats or Bollywood sirens, wittily navigating the eternal perils of class, romance and unworthy men.

Few challenges, however, are as unusual as the latest foe facing Elizabeth Bennet of Pride and Prejudice – a plague of the undead sent to reduce the picturesque villages of Longbourn and Meryton to smouldering ruins.

Hollywood studios are bidding to turn a radical reworking of Austen’s most popular book, now called Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, a parody to be published in April, into a blockbuster movie.

Desperate for new ideas, studio chiefs hope “P&P&Z” will mark the bloody birth of a feral offspring of classic British literature: “monster-lit”.

If anyone is interested, the full article is available here: http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/film/article5683554.ece

[Kemal]

A zombie attack may be the only thing that would tempt me to watch a film adaptation of one of Jane Austen's horrendously boring books.

I would bet on the zombies winning, because there isn't a single male in any of her stories with a functioning set of balls.

[scouse mac]

I would bet on the zombies winning, because there isn't a single male in any of her stories with a functioning set of balls.

I disagree.

Heavily armed with suppressed sexuality and stoic dispositions, my money is on the Bennett girls.

[_____V_____]

Natalie Portman has signed on to star in Lionsgate's new adaptation of Jane Austen and Seth Grahame-Smith's reimagined period romance novel.

In case you've missed all the hype surrounding this bestseller, Pride and Prejudice and Zombies is exactly what it sounds like: a new version of Austen's much-loved story of feisty, yet socially repressed heroine Elizabeth Bennet and her unforseen romancing by the aloof and arrogant Mr Darcy.

Except that in Grahame-Smith's update, Bennet also has zombies to contend with after the outbreak of a virus that turns the dead into flesh-eaters. Now if only we'd been allowed to study this version when we were at school...

Portman will be playing the suitor- and zombie-chashed heroine, as well as producing (now there's an empowered woman Austen would have been proud of).

There's no word yet on who'll play her Mr Darcy, though we do have an hankering to see Colin Firth cast as a zombie somewhere in this. Poetic justice and all that.

"Natalie and I are longtime passionate fans of Jane Austen's books," announces Portman's fellow producer Annette Savitch. "And this a fresh, fun and thought-provoking way to approach her work."

"The idea of zombies running rampant in 19th-century England may sound odd, but it lends a modern sense of urgency to a well-known love story."

If it doesn't, they're probably doing it wrong. Now we're wondering if anybody's going to snap up Grahame-Smith's follow-up, Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters. Sounds like a goer to us...