David Fincher is no stranger to television, as he successfully shepherded Netflix’s political drama “House of Cards” to prominence early last year, spawning the widespread cultural acceptance of binge-watching and in turn picking up an Emmy for his directorial efforts on the series’ premiere episode.
However, while he stepped out of the director’s chair after that show’s first two episodes, Fincher intends to remain at the helm a little bit longer when his new HBO series “Utopia” starts production. As he tells The Guardian, he plans to direct the entire first season — and then it’s anyone’s guess what his involvement will be after that, though I wouldn’t be at all surprised to see him stick around and produce future seasons, much as he did with “House of Cards.”
Gillian Flynn, who scripted Fincher’s upcoming film Gone Girl based on her own novel, will pen the scripts for season one of “Utopia“. This setup reminds me a lot of “True Detective“, which had one director (Cary Fukunaga) and one writer (Nic Pizzolatto) carry the season through from beginning to end, with tremendous results.
“Utopia“, a sci-fi conspiracy thriller, is being adapted from the British show of the same name. There’s no telling exactly where Fincher and Flynn’s version of the story will go, but below is a brief synopsis for the British series:
“Utopia” will follow a group of people who find themselves in possession of a manuscript of a cult graphic novel. The tome is rumoured to have predicted the worst disasters of the last century and the group soon find themselves targeted by a shadowy organisation known only as The Network.
Fincher told The Guardian he doesn’t yet have plans for what he will do after “Utopia“, though we learned earlier this month that he and James Ellroy (L.A. Confidential) are developing a 1950s crime-noir series for HBO.
Beyond that, I imagine he’s got any number of options to choose from, though I’m still yearning to see something come of The Girl Who Played with Fire, the heavily-delayed follow-up to Fincher’s The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo that was recently re-written by Seven scribe Andrew Kevin Walker, but I get the feeling that project is probably off the table — even if Fincher says he still thinks it could be made.
