EXCLUSIVE: New Regency is adapting Pulitzer Prize winner Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian, widely considered one of the greatest works of American literature, as a feature film. John Hillcoat set to direct.
The film will be produced by New Regency, Black Bear Pictures’ Keith Redmon, and Hillcoat. McCarthy and his son, John Francis McCarthy, will serve as executive producers.
Published in 1985, the novel is an epic tale of the violence and depravity that attended America’s westward expansion, brilliantly subverting the conventions of the Western novel and the mythology of the Wild West. Based on historical events that took place on the Texas-Mexico border in the 1850s, it traces the fortunes of the Kid, a 14-year-old Tennesseean who stumbles into a nightmarish world where Indians are being murdered and the market for their scalps is thriving.
McCarthy’s novels are always something the industry has been drawn to going back to the Coen Brothers’ Oscar-winning No Country for Old Men adaptation as well as Hillcoat’s own adaptation of The Road, with this film marking a reunion for the two.
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Hillcoat most recently directed episodes of the Showtime limited series George & Tammy starring Jessica Chastain and Michael Shannon. He is represented by CAA, Anonymous Content and Black Bear Pictures. McCarthy is represented by CAA.
