Heads are spinning at the prospect of a remake of Alfred Hitchcock’s classic 1958 film, Vertigo.
As first reported by Deadline, Robert Downey Jr. will be starring in the new film for Paramount Pictures. He’s producing the project via his Team Downey entity (which also including his wife Susan Downey) in conjunction with John Davis and John Fox at Davis Entertainment. The new Vertigo script will be penned by Steven Knight (Peaky Blinders), who is also writing a new Star Wars screenplay for Lucasfilm, says Variety.
Downey recently appeared in Avengers: Endgame, which quickly became a blockbuster hit in terms of box-office receipts after its 2019 release. He also appeared in the less lucrative Dolittle, which came out in 2020, and in the documentary Sr. about his father, a film he also produced. This summer, Downey will appear opposite Cillian Murphy in Oppenheimer, a historical epic by Christopher Nolan.
Hitchcock’s original Vertigo debuted in 1958, starring James Stewart as a San Francisco detective with an intense fear of heights. He becomes obsessed with a woman he’s investigating (played by Kim Novak), who ultimately plunges to her death from the tower of a Spanish mission.
In a 2012 survey by the British Film Institute, the film was ranked number one in its list of the 100 best films of all time.
Variety recently ranked it 32nd in a similar listing.
Vertigo was inspired by the French novel D’entre les morts, which was set in Paris during World War II. The original scriptwriters were Alec Coppel and Samuel A. Taylor. The 1958 film was the first to make use of the so-called dolly zoom, a device that creates disorientation by altering the visual perspective of the viewers.
This is not the first time that Vertigo has been tinkered with. In 1965, it was remade as a Tamil-language thriller titled Kalangarai Vilakkam. In 2022, a video game adaptation was released, but critics were underwhelmed.
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