It’s been over seventeen years since anyone has tried to remake one of Alfred Hitchcock’s classic films with Gus Van Sant’s 1998 take on Psycho, but when you have a blockbuster hit like last year’s Gone Girl, which grossed over $350 million worldwide, why not find a reason to bring that team back together for another movie about trying to murder your wife like Hitchcock’s Strangers on a Train?
Deadline is reporting that Warner Bros. Pictures is doing just that by reuniting the Gone Girl team of director David Fincher, screenwriter/author Gillian Flynn and actor Ben Affleck to produce a remake of Alfred Hitchcock’s 1951thriller Strangers on a Train, which has been hugely influential on so many other movies over the past sixty years.
Their version will be based on the Hitchcock adaptation of Patricia Highsmith’s novel, but it will be a modernized version of the story that might just be called Strangers, produced by Affleck and Matt Damon’s production banner Pearl Street with Jon Berg overseeing.
The original movie starred Farley Granger as a tennis pro who had grown tired of his wife and who meets a rich man on a train who suggests they swap murders to avoid getting caught.
According to Deadline, this version would have Affleck playing “a movie star–in the middle of a campaign for an Oscar during awards season” and it would take place on airplanes with Affleck’s character getting a ride to L.A. from a wealthy stranger after his own private plane breaks down.
The idea of remaking Strangers on a Train has apparently been volleying around Warner Bros. for a number of years, and Affleck is hoping to make time in his schedule to shoot the film before directing and starring in his second Dennis Lehane adaptation Live by Night, currently scheduled for October 2016.
