Is it really a remake, though, or just a modern adaptation? Alfred Hitchcock’s classic Strangers on a Train was adapted from a novel by Patricia Highsmith of the same name. The title is most widely known as a Hitchcock movie, but I don’t know if a modern take actually counts as a remake of Hitchcock, or just a modern update on the novel. At any rate, the Gone Girl team of David Fincher, Gillian Flynn, and Ben Affleck are in talks to make a new adaptation titled Strangers. Instead of being set on a train, now it will be two people—one of whom is an actor campaigning for an award—meeting on a private jet. Get this motherf*cking stranger off my motherf*cking plane!
I’m into this. Not so much the actor/rich people plotting murder bit, but this group of people taking on this material. I’d be even more into if they conceived it as the Gone Girl sequel Flynn’s willing to write. Who’s more likely to plan whose murder first, Nick or Amy? I want to say Amy, but as long as she has Nick under her thumb, I think she’d let things lie. But Nick…he’d be looking for a way out. And he’d send some poor fool after his crazy/smart wife and Amy would make mincemeat of them.
But it will stand as an update of Highsmith’s novel, too. Fincher excels at cold calculation, and he and Flynn share an interest in perception and fantasy that ought to serve the story well here. And Affleck, having cemented his reputation as a filmmaker, seems determined to revamp his reputation as an actor now. Gone Girl was his best performance in a long time—maybe ever—so re-teaming with the people who got that performance out of him makes a lot of sense. Hopefully he’ll take on the bored rich guy and not the actor, though. But let’s be honest—both roles are privileged assholes, and that’s a part Ben Affleck was born to play.
