Skyfall writer John Logan is gonna try to adapt Blood Meridian, god bless him

People have been trying, for at least 20 years, to turn Cormac McCarthy’s Western opus Blood Meridian into a movie—and every single one of them has failed. Big names, too: Ridley Scott moved heaven or hell to try to get the movie made in the 2000s, and Tommy Lee Jones, who would later star in the Coens’ adaptation of McCarthy’s less nihilistic and bloody—if only by comparison—No Country For Old Men, even tried to touch up a version of a screenplay himself a few years prior. McCarthy always pushed back on the idea that his book was fundamentally “unfilmable,” but the fact is that the novel is so rooted in the human impulse for violence that every studio who’s been asked to tackle the material has ultimately balked.

Last year, though, we reported that New Regency was taking another stab at it, tapping John Hillcoat (who’d previously adapted a crowd-pleasing version of McCarthy’s post-apocalyptic novel The Road) to adapt the story of The Kid, the Glanton Gang, and the evils they perpetrate on, and as part of, the American West. Now, Deadline reports that a writer has officially been brought in to bring McCarthy’s blend of lush descriptions and terse, elliptical prose to the screen, with Skyfall and Spectre screenwriter John Logan taking on the gig.

Logan has had a long and interesting career, including making his directorial debut last year, with the LGBTQ+-focused slasher film They/Them. His Sam Mendes Bond flicks have been among his most successful outings as a screenwriter, but he’s got a long track record writing for some of the biggest names in the business, including Martin Scorsese (with The Aviator and Hugo) and Scott himself (having penned the Oscar-nominated screenplay for Gladiator, among others). He certainly has the bona fides to at least try to get Blood Meridian cut down into a movie, although none of the things that have made the book nigh-impossible to adapt over the last 3 decades have gone away in the meantime—its relentless grimness, its queasy fascination with violence and depravity, or its willingness to leave certain key moments horrifically just out-of-frame.

As we noted the last time this project came up, though, there’s an even more intriguing question lurking out in the tall grass now: Who will Hillcoat find to play the book’s most irresistible character, the hairless, charming, endlessly malevolent Judge Holden? You could argue that Stellan Skarsgård put in a hell of an audition with his work in the recent Dune films, but it’s going to be a bloodbath out there, as Hollywood’s upper-tier character actors battle it out for the juicy, monstrous part.