A bidding war is on to pick up the Scott Rudin production of Jonathan Franzen’s novel Purity (Macmillan/FSG; Macmillan Audio; OverDrive Sample), reports Variety. Daniel Craig is attached as the male lead Andreas Wolf, a charismatic trader of the world’s secrets à la Julian Assange of WikiLeaks.

Showtime, Netflix, FX, and at least three others are each reportedly interested. Deadline, in a gossipy piece, says Hulu and Amazon are both in as well, but gives the early odds to Showtime.

The adaption is thought to be a 20-episode deal and will be written by both Franzen and the director of the project.

It is early days yet, and, as Variety notes, Rudin tried to get Franzen’s The Corrections on air with HBO but the project failed to move forward after the pilot was shot.

Purity, which is not widely considered Franzen’s best book (signature reviews in both the NYT and NPR were tepid), is timely however, touching on the seismic changes social media and the Internet have wrought.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 16th, 2016 at 10:20 am and is filed under Books & Movies, Fiction, Literary. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.