BookTok inches closer to MovieTok as Tomorrow, And Tomorrow, And Tomorrow finds director
CODA director Siân Heder is set to helm the upcoming adaptation of Gabrielle Zevin's best-selling novel
Page-to-screen adaptations have been popular for eons now, but it feels like the turnaround window keeps getting shorter and shorter. The latest BookTok phenom to make the jump is Tomorrow, And Tomorrow, And Tomorrow, the best-selling 2022 novel by Gabrielle Zevin. If you’re reading this and thinking, ‘huh, two years feels pretty reasonable,” hold that thought. Paramount actually bought the rights to the story for $2 million in 2021, over a year before the book even hit the shelves. This isn’t a knock on this particular novel at all, but it would be cool for readers to also rally behind something a little less market-approved.
Regardless, it looks like Paramount’s big gambit paid off, as Tomorrow, And Tomorrow, And Tomorrow went on to sell over 2.8 million copies worldwide, and will likely deliver the same sort of returns in big screen form. Per Deadline, the film has officially found its director in Siân Heder, the award-winning filmmaker behind 2021 Best Picture winner CODA and 2016 dramedy Tallulah.
At least Heder is managing to stave off a dark future filled with B-tier superhero flicks, as prophesied during her very funny cameo in season four of Barry. What she decidedly isn’t escaping is the growing trend of video game adaptations and gaming-centric stories, including recent titles like Fallout, Five Nights At Freddy’s, and The Last Of Us. Per an official synopsis, the decades-long tale of two friends who meet as children and reunite years later at Cambridge to create video games, sees them “finding an intimacy in digital storytelling that eludes them in their real lives.” The synopsis continues: “The relationship explores the intimacy, passion, and heartbreak of creative collaboration, set against the visually groundbreaking worlds brought to life by the rising video game industry of the 1990s-2000s.”
Zevin wrote a first draft of the script, which was edited by Mark Bomback. The author is also serving as an executive producer on the film.