Comic Con: Edgar Wright’s Next Two New Movies: ‘Baby Driver’ & ‘Grasshopper Jungle’
In the wake of his departure from Marvel’s Ant-Man, my first question was this: Where does Edgar Wright go from here? Does he wander the Earth finding himself for a while? Actually, as it turns out, for the man who directed Scott Pilgrim and the “Cornetto trilogy” (Shaun of the Dead, Hot Fuzz, World’s End), work isn’t hard to come by, and he has lined up his next two features to direct: Baby Driver and Grasshopper Jungle. (This news came from Comic Con, though Wright didn’t appear in person.)
The first movie will be produced by his Cornetto team, Working Title films, and has been described (according to Deadline) as a “collision of crime, action, music and sound.” There’s no other synopsis in place at this time, and perhaps for Wright’s big-bad return to directing the less known the better for now. But the fact that the movie was in development before Wright’s time in pre-production on Ant-Man is a good sign (though according to the same article there’s no word on his frequent stars Simon Pegg and Nick Frost being involved).
The second film is an adaptation of a YA novel, Grasshopper Jungle, written by Andrew Smith (the screenplay by Scott Rosenberg of Beautiful Girls). This story is about a young boy and his friends who set off a chain of events that unleash a plague of human-sized praying mantises (see the , apparently some sexual overtones are also to be found).
Considering how much fun Wright has with depicting the complex inner-workings of groups of men (young or old, see The World’s End for more of this awesomeness) and mixing pathos with grandiose, often comic special effects, this could likely be much more than the premise sounds – which in other hands could be a movie for the SyFy Channel (in the US anyway). Via Deadline where this news also appeared, the logline is described as Attack the Block (which Wright produced by the way) meets Stand by Me.
The film will be produced by Nira Park, who is also on board for Baby Driver with Working Title (Sony distributing).
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