Credit: Variety
Warner Bros. and Graham King’s Initial Entertainment Group — which produced The Departed for Warners — have acquired screen rights to bestselling Brian Selznick children’s novel The Invention of Hugo Cabret as a potential directing vehicle for Scorsese.
Published last month by Scholastic, the novel concerns a 12-year-old orphan who lives in the walls of a Paris train station in 1930 and a mystery involving the boy, his late father and a robot. Scorsese recently inked a lucrative first-look deal with Paramount. Under the terms of the pact, Par has the right to own half of any project Scorsese directs or produces elsewhere.
This does not include pre-existing projects set up at another studio, Variety is reporting.
Hugo Cabret joins several projects on Scorsese’s to-do list.
While the director hasn’t declared his next film, helming projects on his front burner include Silence, an adaptation of the Shusaku Endo novel about two 17th century Jesuit priests who witness the hardships of spreading Christianity in Japan.
A sequel to The Departed is also being considered, based on an idea by screenwriter William Monahan.
At Paramount, Scorsese is developing the bigscreen adaptation of Eric Jager’s historical tome Last Duel: A True Story of Crime, Scandal and Trial by Combat in Medieval France.
