Gone Girl’s Gillian Flynn To Work Again With Ben Affleck

Team Gone Girl is reuniting for another dark tale of suspense and danger. Only this time, they’re headed for remake territory, as David Fincher, Ben Affleck and Gillian Flynn will create a new version of Alfred Hitchcock’s “Strangers On A Train.”

The new thriller, currently just called Strangers, is an update of the original story. Flynn will write the script about a film star (Affleck) deep in the middle of an Oscar campaign who needs to hitch a ride when the private plane he’s been using to jet around the country breaks down. He believes his luck has changed when a wealthy stranger offers him a lift to Los Angeles on his own swanky aircraft. Things take a turn for the complicated from there.

Fincher and company are keeping the rest of the details to themselves for now. The 1951 film, adapted from Patricia Highsmith’s novel, saw Farley Granger playing Guy Haines, a bored tennis pro who meets a stranger on a train (Robert Walker) and concocts a scheme to swap murderous acts with the wealthy socialite psycho in the hopes that they can both get away scot free. Of course, it doesn’t quite work out that way.

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Oh, say it isn’t so…The news from Hollywood is that David Fincher’s movie version of “Gone Girl” will have an ending that differs significantly from that of Gillian Flynn’s bestselling novel.

Now here’s the truly startling news….Flynn is making the changes herself ….she’s writing the screenplay. She’s given the story “a whole new third act,” an alteration drastic enough that it “shocked” the film’s star, Ben Affleck. Flynn comments…“There was something thrilling about taking this piece of work that I’d spent two years painstakingly putting together, with all its 8 million Lego pieces, take a hammer to it and bash it apart and reassemble it into a movie.”

So….maybe the film version will surprise us all over again. For more book headlines, tune into my show The Book Report.

Gone Girl

If you’ve read Gone Girl, you know why it’s gone up the charts…and stayed there.

Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl has sold more than 2 million copies worldwide. The film version is set to be produced by Reese Witherspoon. I picked it up recently on a trip, and opted out of an excursion just to keep reading.

What really resonates with readers is that main characters Amy and husband Nick take turns narrating events, but not from the same point in time. As the pages fly by, you begin to doubt first one narrator, then the other. And the ending….wow…you just don’t see it coming. (If you’ve read it, you know what I mean. If not – pick it up.)

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