HBO to become an even darker place with new Gillian Flynn adaptation
HBO's Sharp Objects, based on Flynn's novel of the same name, previously aired on the streamer in 2018
Time to pop a cold one, fans of terrible people, killer monologues, and very true-feeling fictional crime. At long last, one of the most fucked up, perfect triple-features imaginable is one step closer to reality. Following the success of 2014's Gone Girl and HBO’s 2018 Sharp Objects, beloved thriller author Gillian Flynn’s 2009 novel Dark Places is finally getting its fair shake. Everybody say, “Satanic panic!”
Okay, yes… There’s technically already a Dark Places movie that came out in 2015 starring Charlize Theron, Chloë Grace Moretz, and Nicholas Hoult. You’re not having déjà vu. But Flynn fans like to practice a little selective amnesia in regards to the Gilles Paquet-Brenner-directed film because it was, to put it frankly, bad. In The A.V. Club’s B- review, for example, we called it “the darkest Lifetime movie never made.”
Now, HBO is joining Disney+ and Netflix in a new practice that’s rapidly become a trend: taking a beloved book or series that got a terrible movie adaptation, and redoing it as a (hopefully) much better show. Disney+ did it with Percy Jackson And The Olympians and Netflix is hoping to repeat the magic with their upcoming live-action Avatar: The Last Airbender remake later this year.
According to Variety, Flynn will serve as co-creator, writer, and co-showrunner for HBO’s newest stab (sorry) at her novel. She’ll be joined by married couple Brett Johnson and Guerrin Gardner, who are credited as co-showrunner, co-creator, and writer, and co-creator and writer respectively. Johnson created Showtime’s Escape at Dannemora and has written for Ray Donovan, Mad Men, and more, while Gardner has acted and written for shorts like Chowchilla and Michael Peterson.
Dark Places is, unsurprisingly, a pretty dark tale. The show’s official logline reads:
Libby Day was seven when her mother and two sisters were murdered in the famous 1985 ‘Satan Sacrifice of Kinnakee, Kansas.’ She survived—and famously testified that her teenage brother, Ben, was the killer. Twenty-five years later, a pair of mother/daughter true crime ‘detectives’ locate a grownup Libby and pump her for details, believing that Ben is innocent. Libby, having spent her youth working the talk show circuit, hopes to once again turn a profit off her tragic history: She’ll reconnect with the players from that night and report her findings —for a fee. As Libby’s search takes her from shabby Missouri strip clubs to abandoned Oklahoma tourist traps, the unimaginable truth emerges, and Libby finds herself right back where she started—on the run from a killer.
No casting announcements as of yet, but—at least in the book—Libby is as nuanced and sticky a protagonist as Gone Girl’s Amy Dunne or Sharp Objects’ Camille Preaker, played expertly by Rosamund Pike and Amy Adams in the film and series respectively. Whoever takes her on has a huge task ahead of them.