Martin Scorsese is a very busy man. He’s currently hard at work shooting a documentary about Bill Clinton, making his Jesuits-in-Japan drama Silence, and throughout it all, prepping for his long-gestating Frank Sinatra biopic. So understandably, while he was once attached to direct the Norwegian serial killer drama The Snowman, he’s now passed that duty on to Let The Right One In director (and actual Scandinavian person) Tomas Alfredson. Scorsese will stay on to executive produce the film.
The Snowman follows hard-boiled, unfortunately named Oslo detective Harry Hole as he tracks down Norway’s very first serial killer, a mysterious figure who marks his murders the same way schoolchildren mark a snow day: by building a snowman. The movie is being adapted from the seventh in a series of Harry Hole novels by author Jo Nesbø. Working Title Films and Universal are hoping to turn the movie into a franchise as well, testing the ability of American audiences to withstand the bleak Scandinavian landscape and to continually hear the name “Harry Hole”—which the author did not intend as a play on words—without sniggering into their popcorn.