That’s the teaser for the Channel Four series, Utopia, a sci-fi show (with a Misfits alumni!) about some people who find a graphic novel that predicts major world disasters. A shadowy group called, The Network starts chasing them, naturally.
You should get acquainted, because David Fincher has signed on to direct the entire first season of HBO’s planned remake.
Yup.
Fincher, it should be said, has worked in “television” before. But like House of Cards, this is another piece of an overall puzzle that’s starting to come together. The barriers between film, television, streaming content, etc. is starting to break apart. Content is getting more and more individualized and in order to make a mark (or maintain a brand), various studios and content providers are giving artists the kind of freedom they used to get in the 60s and 70s before Michael Cimino spooked everyone by crashing United Artists. Film has been slower to adapt, clinging to tentpoles and inflating budgets in lieu of smaller films with higher yields. But HBO (and its sister network, Cinemax) is taking a different, curatorial route. They’ve already got your subscriber fees (or your friends’ subscriber fees, for those of you who share HBO GO passwords) and they know that you’re paying it to see “adult” programming with a pedigree. In other words: the kind of films David Fincher has been making for almost two decades. So they’re giving him and his crew a wide berth to do his thing, which has to be appealing to a guy like Fincher, who, even all these years later, still butts heads with the studios and leaves long-in-development projects because of quibbling over budgets (see: 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea).
As film fans, we can’t look at this as the beginning of an exodus or a betrayal of the medium we love so much, but rather an extension and melding of the craft of filmmaking into another medium. The same creative muscles will be flexed. Fincher is still going to be a filmmaker. And as people like Steven Speilberg become more and more vocal about how broken the Hollywood system is and how difficult it is for HIM to get films greenlit, you have to wonder how many others A-list directors are going to follow this path.
Gillian Flynn (author and screenwriter of Gone Girl) is writing the series, so there must be a strong comfort level between the two as collaborators. I personally hope he brings his DP, Jeff Cronenweth with him too.
From The Guardian.