Just over a month ago, Dan wrote about the fantastic Danny Boyle’s probable Sunshine follow-up, set in the Johannesburg Ponte Tower and called…Ponte Tower. Now, Time Out (the original source for the story) says that ain’t happening…at least not yet. Bad news, since the idea was promising, but there is a silver lining, as Boyle has replaced it with another project.
The new next movie is Slum Dog Millionaire, which is both high concept and (evidently) true story. A Mumbai slum boy makes his way to the Hindi version of Who Wants To Be A Millionaire? and notches a win, all to reconnect with a chick he lost touch with back home. But since everyone knows that poor people are stupid and dishonest, the show’s producers assume that the kid cheated his way to a million rupees. That’s only about twenty-four thousand bucks, totally not worth the effort to fake a win.
The script, by Full Monty revealer Simon Beaufoy, evidently features a flashback structure that shows how our boy knows the answers to all his questions. Kinda like the game show version of Lost, or at least that’s what I’m envisioning.
Sunshine, incidentally, opened in the UK over the weekend to mixed reviews: The Guardian, Empire and (unsurprisingly) Time Out all seem to dig it, while Variety used the words ‘implode’ and ‘black hole’, and not to describe celestial bodies on screen. I’m still dying to see it.