It’s a well-known fact that William Shakespeare, at the time of his death, was planning to revamp all of his plays, adding in new fight scenes and explosions to spice things up. Sadly, his premature passing at the age of super-old means we have been stuck for centuries telling the same, outdated versions of these plays. Finally, however, Hollywood is doing the thing it does best: take a property widely recognized as one of the better pieces of art in Western history and add a little pizazz. According to The Hollywood Reporter, Sony is picking up Verona, a spec script that retells the story of Romeo And Juliet as an epic action movie in the vein of 300.
The script, from Neil Widener and Gavin James (presumably King Of Queens actor Kevin James, but pronounced by an Australian), supposedly reimagines the timeless love story between two teenagers from warring families as a hyper-stylized saga. “It’ll do for flashy, ADHD-ridden updates of Romeo And Juliet what Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo + Juliet didn’t do for Romeo And Juliet,” producer Joe Roth probably said. Details on the film are being kept under wraps for now, lest someone else get the wholly original idea of re-working an old classic into the format of a four-quadrant Hollywood blockbuster. Look for Verona to go into production sometime soon, likely right around the same time we get word that another studio is making a version of The Bell Jar where Sylvia Plath engages in a parkour-and-kung-fu fight to the death with a sentient, Terminator-esque oven.