As Unknown rolls into US theaters (and comes to the UK in March), the director of that movie, Jaume Collet-Serra, has chosen his next project to be Red Circle, which Deadline reports will be a remake of Jean-Pierre Melville’s 1970 thriller Le Cercle Rouge.
Eastern Promises’s Steven Knight will pen the screenplay, which will be a heist thriller set in Hong Kong. Jaume Collet-Serra is also set to direct Harker for Warner Bros., a potential franchise starter that follows vampire hunter Jonathan Harker as featured in the original novel Bram Stoker’s Dracula.
At one point, Le Cercle Rouge was set to be remade by John Woo, who’s a major fan of Melville’s work. He then passed it on to Johnnie To and John Hillcaot flirted with it for a while. They may all have made interesting movie, but whether Serra, the director of House of Wax, Orphan and Unknown, is the right man for the job remains to be seen. Melville’s heist movie, about a thief and an escaped murderer taking on a heist is a masterpiece of tone, with long dialogue free stretches, filled with subtle and clever visual storytelling. It’s difficult to imagine Serra turning it into anything but a rather generic flick that thinks it’s cleverer than it is.
It is unclear at this time when Red Circle will begin production, and whether it will come before or after Harker, although as potential franchise flicks normally take a while to set up, Le Cercle Rouge may be something Serra feels he can slot in before he takes on the vampiric tale.