Variety reports that Aaron Taylor-Johnson (Avengers: Age Of Ultron) and Michael Shannon (Boardwalk Empire) have joined the cast of Nocturnal Animals, Tom Ford’s follow-up to A Single Man that likely will continue the director’s obsession with characters whose impeccable wardrobes act as countermeasures to their emotional undress.
Based on the novel Tony And Susan by Austin Wright, the film is split into two halves. The first half follows Alice (Amy Adams), a woman who receives a book manuscript from her ex-husband (Jake Gyllenhaal) whom she left 20 years earlier. The second half is a dramatization of that manuscript, entitled Nocturnal Animals, about a man whose family vacation turns deadly.
According to The Playlist, Ford originally envisioned the project as two separate films, but that idea was never implemented. This is most likely because an executive somewhere gradually realized that Nocturnal Animals isn’t a CG-laden movie about a team of cute critters who save the world from aliens and immediately squashed the multi-film option. Now, the standalone movie is set for release sometime in 2016, but we’ll keep dreaming about Tom Ford having his own shared universe.