After the disappointing box office of Justice League, director Zack Snyder is looking to get back into the grandiose filmmaking game with his planned adaptation of Ayn Rand’s 1943 novel The Fountainhead. Snyder revealed as much to a fan on Vero (via Deadline), where he confirmed the Fountainhead remake would be his next project, as opposed to his long-in-development Afghanistan war drama The Last Photograph.
The Fountainhead is officially Zack’s next project instead of The Last Photograph. pic.twitter.com/pKS84l3uO8
— ςняιѕ яανєи (@ChrisRa7en) May 28, 2018
Snyder previously said that the rights to Rand’s book were held by Warner Bros., where his Cruel & Unusual Films is based. Although his experience on Justice League was not ideal (complicated further by the death of his daughter), and his Batman v Superman‘s poor reception has been blamed for polluting the DC brand, the idea of Snyder continuing at Warners will be interesting, especially on a project like this that is virtually guaranteed to spark controversy.
“I have been working on ‘The Fountainhead,'” Snyder stated in 2016. “I’ve always felt like ‘The Fountainhead’ was such a thesis on the creative process and what it is to create something. Warner Bros. owns [Ayn Rand’s] script and I’ve just been working on that a little bit.”
The script he’s referring to is the one Rand wrote for King Vidor’s 1949 adaptation starring Gary Cooper, which bombed at the box office and which the author later disavowed. The book, about an architect named Howard Rourke who strives to go against the grain in service of a more modern style of building, is a cornerstone of Rand’s controversial Objectivist philosophy, based around “rational self-interest.”
The late Oscar-winning filmmaker Michael Cimino (The Deer Hunter) penned a screenplay of The Fountainhead in the mid-seventies with Clint Eastwood in mind for the Rourke part, but the failure of Heaven’s Gate took the wind out of his sails. In the early 2000s, Francis Ford Coppola attempted to mount his dream project Megalopolis, a story with an architect protagonist heavily inspired by Rourke, but the massive budget proved unattainable.
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