©Courtesy of Warner Brothers
Morten Tyldum is reportedly in the running to direct a remake of Rope, the acclaimed psychological crime thriller by Alfred Hitchcock. According to The InSneider, the project will be produced by Davis Entertainment, but casting details have yet to be revealed.
Tyldum, who directed Headhunters in 2011, was acclaimed for The Imitation Game, about cryptologist Alan Turing. It starred Benedict Cumberbatch and earned eight Oscar nominations, including those for Best Picture and Best Director. In 2016, Tyldum helmed Sony’s Passengers, starring Chris Pratt and Jennifer Lawrence, which was not a critical success.
Details about the cast and screenwriter for the Rope remake have yet to be revealed. Steven Knight of Peaky Blinders fame had drafted a script for a version by David Fincher, who had also reportedly been in the running for the director’s job along with Charlize Theron and Rupert Goold.
Fincher already has three other projects in development for Netflix: a Chinatown prequel series, Squid Game: America, and Bitterroot, a Western.
Tyldum had directed several television features after Passengers, including a Jack Ryan pilot for Amazon, the Defending Jacob series for Apple TV+, and the initial three episodes of Silo, also for Apple TV+.
Hitchcock’s Rope, released in 1948, starred James Stewart, John Dall, Farley Granger, Cedric Hardwicke, Constance Collier, and Joan Chandler. It was based on a 1929 play by Patrick Hamilton about two men who host a dinner party after strangling a friend to death, in the belief that they had committed the perfect murder. The script was adapted by Hume Cronyn with a screenplay by Arthur Laurents. It was the first of Hitchcock’s films in Technicolor. Hamilton’s play was reputed to have been inspired by the 1924 murder of 14-year-old Bobby Franks by Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb, two students at the University of Chicago.