It’s always nice to see a great director knock it out of the park, and get well rewarded for doing so. Slumdog Millionaire has kicked every important ass and taken every noteworthy name with 8 Oscar wins and a ton of cash (350ish million, worldwide) in the bag. One can only imagine the DVD is doing better than okay.
Whether or not you found Slumdog overblown (I did not), recent news should warm your black heart: Danny Boyle will be sitting pretty under a 3-year production deal arranged between the filmmaker, Fox Searchlight, and Pathe Pictures.
Fox Searchlight*, who fortuitously saved Slumdog Millionaire after it was semi-dumped by WB, will be handling the brunt of distribution and financing. Pathe, a company loyal to Slumdog from early on, will co-finance the pictures, and handle distribution in a few specific European countries, including the U.K.
As nice as this news is, I’m much more interested in hearing what Boyle will be doing first under this new partnership. Last week, the U.K.’s Telegraph reported word of Slumdog writer Simon Beaufoy working on a new India-centric script for Boyle, based on the non-fiction Maxium City: Bombay Lost and Found.
“It was only decided a couple of weeks ago, but I will be writing the script for Danny,” he said. “Maximum City is a non-fiction work, so it will be a huge challenge to find the story in it. It is a wonderful book and I used it in my initial research for Slumdog. There are some great characters in the book, but no stories, so my job will be to get the fictional out of a non-fictional story.”
Boyle certainly has his options open at this point, so it’s only a matter of time before he settles on a project, be it Maxium City or something we’ve yet to hear of…
Source: Variety, Telegraph | Picture: Time
*A studio with a wonderful P.R. department… For the last two years
they’ve furnished me with excellent and abundant swag to charitably
auction at my film school’s OSCARs party.