Coming to a theater near you...maybe someday...
Sometimes a book comes out that seems like an obvious candidate for a film adaptation. Then, for one reason or another, it lingers in Hollywood and either never gets made, or when it finally does, it’s a mess. One of those lingering books is Neal Stephenson’s “Snow Crash,” a sci-fi novel that is considered one of the great early books of the computer/Internet age. It was picked up by Paramount after it was published in 1992, hung around for years, and nothing ever happened. The rights lapsed, but now Deadline says that Paramount has reacquired it with plans for Joe Cornish to direct.
Joe Cornish has been one of the hottest names in directing after making last year’s surprise alien invasion hit “Attack the Block.” He’s been offered numerous films but this is the one he chose as his follow up. He’s done some acting, wrote the screenplay for “Attack the Block, has a co-writer credit on “The Adventures of Tintin,” and is also supposedly a co-writer on the mythical “Ant-Man” screenplay. With that in mind, I’d think he would write the adaptation of “Snow Crash” as well.
Speaking of, here’s Amazon’s synopsis of “Snow Crash.”
From the opening line of his breakthrough cyberpunk novel Snow Crash, Neal Stephenson plunges the reader into a not-too-distant future. It is a world where the Mafia controls pizza delivery, the United States exists as a patchwork of corporate-franchise city-states, and the Internet–incarnate as the Metaverse–looks something like last year’s hype would lead you to believe it should. Enter Hiro Protagonist–hacker, samurai swordsman, and pizza-delivery driver. When his best friend fries his brain on a new designer drug called Snow Crash and his beautiful, brainy ex-girlfriend asks for his help, what’s a guy with a name like that to do? He rushes to the rescue. A breakneck-paced 21st-century novel, Snow Crash interweaves everything from Sumerian myth to visions of a postmodern civilization on the brink of collapse. Faster than the speed of television and a whole lot more fun, Snow Crash is the portrayal of a future that is bizarre enough to be plausible. –
I’m a fan of Stephenson’s work, so I say, go for it, Joe, finally get this one done!
