At least, that would seem to be the thinking over at Lionsgate. According to Variety, the studio has hired Noble Jones to write a screenplay adapting the novel by Bret Easton Ellis, whose work has previously been translated to film with the underrated The Rules of Attraction and the rightfully forgotten The Informers.
Jones has yet to pen a produced screenplay, but did serve as a second unit director on David Fincher's The Social Network. This new American Psycho hasn't received a green light and is in the very earliest stages of development at Lionsgate, which distributed the 2000 film in America.
Deadline adds that Jones, who has also directed many a music video, actually turned in the screenplay a month ago. Additionally, Jones would direct the feature on a smaller budget than the first adaptation. This micro-budget take would take the protagonist out of the late 1980's setting of the novel, instead placing him in modern day New York.
Ellis's novel chronicles the exploits of Manhattan investment banker Patrick Bateman of the fictitious firm Pierce and Pierce. The status-obsessed Bateman is an indictment of Reagan era greed, image-consciousness, and vapidity. He also happened to a vicious serial killer, necrophiliac, and rapist with no pity for the fairer sex, to make the metaphor quite clear. To clarify the difficulty of adapting the novel, it contains long passages that are basically just reviews of period-appropriate albums and rambling descriptions of savage violence, which may be entirely in Bateman's head.
The novel was first published in 1991 to no small amount of controversy. The original publisher dropped the book, due largely to vocal protest over its treatment of women, and when it was eventually published by Vintage Books, Ellis received death threats and general flack from folks apparently confused over the nature of fiction.
Harron's film, co-written by Guinevere Turner, originally earned an NC-17 rating from the MPAA due not to any violence, but to a sex sequence set to Phil Collins's "Sussudio." If that doesn't make you want to see it, I don't know what will.
Once again, we'll avoid getting on a remake high horse here, as Harron's American Psycho will continue to exist if a remake happens, as will the original novel (in all its perverse and offensive glory). Still, when an adaptation gets difficult material as right as American Psycho did more than a decade ago, what's to be gained by another crack at the material? The change of setting could be interesting, but if Lionsgate, which was also behind The Rules of Attraction, is so keen on tackling some more Bret Easton Ellis, then perhaps Roger Avary should get to finally make Glamorama, his take on Ellis's 1990's-set tale of a male supermodel recruited to a team of spies/assassins/models.
