Olivia Wilde’s directorial debut Booksmart was huge, ensuring that whatever she does next will—at the very least—have a lot of momentum coming out of the gate, and now we know exactly what that next thing is. As reported by Deadline, Wilde’s next film is called Don’t Worry Darling, and the spec script for it (basically the step between “I have an idea for a movie” and “here’s a finished screenplay for my movie”) just got bought by New Line after an 18-way auction between various movie studios, including Netflix, Legendary, MGM, Blumhouse, and Apple. That’s some tough competition, so New Line presumably paid a hefty amount of money for it. The spec would also presumably be pretty good, but again, Booksmart was so well received that it might not matter.
Deadline says Don’t Worry Darling is a psychological thriller that has a “smart concept that is timely in the Time’s Up era.” It will star Wilde (who will also direct, which is the whole point of that bidding war) as a 1950s housewife “whose reality begins to crack, revealing a disturbing truth underneath.” The original spec came from Shane and Carey Van Dyke, but Booksmart co-writer Katie Silberman will rewrite it to suit “Wilde’s vision.” Silberman and Wilde also recently sold a big “holiday comedy” to Universal, so things are going well for them.