Jordan Peele joins JJ Abrams and Misha Green to bring Lovecraft Country to HBO.
Jordan Peele is completing his move from satirical commentary to social thrillers. His Monkeypaw Productions will team with JJ Abrams’ Bad Robot and Misha Green, the creator of Underground, to bring an adaptation of Matt Ruff’s novel Lovecraft Country to HBO. The project, which was just ordered to series, is also being by Warner Bros TV. The pilot will be written by Green, who will also be the anthology series’ showrunner.
Lovecraft Country will tell the story of Atticus Black, a 25 year old man who goes on a road trip across 1950s Jim Crow America looking for his missing father. Atticus and his Uncle George and a friend named Letitia fight the evils that men do and all the evils of that malevolent spirits can steal from an HP Lovecraft novel.
Peele is reclaiming the horror genre from the African-American perspective. Hot off the success of his $5 million social terror film Get Out, it was recently announced that Peele will also develop a new social thriller for Universal Pictures.
“I wanna stay in the genre,” Peele recently told Variety's Playback Podcast. “While I was developing [Get Out] I was also simultaneously developing four other projects that I call social thrillers. Each one is meant to deal with a different human demon; a different monster that sort of lurks underneath the way that we interact with one another as human beings.
“So I hope to soon direct another one of these social thrillers. It’s not gonna be about race, it’ll be about something else, but it’s gonna be very cinematic and fun. To come up with the perfect monster for a horror movie we really need to look no further than the monster that is all of us. Not so much an individual psycho killer, but the humanity that gets lost between us.”
Warner Brothers reportedly approached Peele to direct a remake of the 1988 anime film Akira.
SOURCE: VARIETY