The Queen’s Gambit has been proven phenomenal for Netflix, currently holding the streamer’s record of most-viewed scripted limited series ever. While an order for a sequel seems unlikely for the show, fans will still have something to look forward to. Series creator Scott Frank and star Anya Taylor-Joy are reportedly reuniting for a new movie project.
On a recent episode of The Ringer’s podcast The Watch, Frank revealed that he is currently working on an adaptation of Vladimir Nabokov’s novel Laughter in the Dark. He noted that he’s been “dying” to adapt the book for the screen, and hopes to shoot in Berlin with the team that made The Queen’s Gambit.
“I’m gonna do it with Anya,” he said of the project. “It’s gonna be kind of a valentine to movies, I’m gonna do it as a film noir. And the book is more about art and paintings; I’m gonna make it more of a movie within a movie.”
“It’s a really nasty, wonderful little thriller. I hope to do it with all the folks I did Queen’s Gambit [with],” the writer-director teased.
Laughter in the Dark follows Albert Albinus, a middle-aged art critic who falls in love with 17-year-old Margot. As their relationship progresses, Margot uses Albert to pursue her ambition of becoming a movie star. The book is said to be an “ironic novel of desire, deceit, and deception; a curious romance set in the film world of Berlin in the 1930s.”
After The Queen’s Gambit’s success, what else awaits Scott Frank?
On the podcast, he also teased a new TV series project based on the character Sam Spade from 1941’s The Maltese Falcon. The six-episode series will star Clive Owen as an older version of Spade living in the south of France.
“It’s 1963, the end of the Algerian War, so all these guys are coming home into the country, and there’s all this sort of socio-political stuff happening,” Frank explained. “And he’s in this little town, and the daughter of Sam Spade and [The Maltese Falcon femme fatale] Brigid O’Shaughnessy, he has in a convent living nearby….Basically, his past finds him in this little town in the south of France.”
Moreover, Frank is also writing an adaptation of Mary Doria Russell’s 1996 sci-fi novel The Sparrow. It tells about the story of Jesuit priests who make contact with extraterrestrial life and set out to find it, in the hopes of proving God’s existence. Johan Renck is set to direct the project.
Meanwhile, The Queen’s Gambit is available for streaming now on Netflix.