An untitled project is set to be fast-tracked by Paramount and marks Damien Chazelle’s follow-up to 2022’s Babylon.
The last we heard from Damien Chazelle, he was expressing a degree of uncertainty about his future as a director.
While there’s surely be no shortage of studios happy to back the La La Land director given the past successes he’s enjoyed, Chazelle is coming off the first real flop of his career, that being 2022’s Babylon. Despite possessing plenty to commend itself, Chazelle’s ode to the excesses of the early days of Hollywood didn’t land with audiences and reportedly lost Paramount somewhere in the vicinity of $90m.
While Babylon may find itself being reappraised somewhere down the line, that doesn’t help Chazelle in the short term and he admitted as much recently, expressing fears that his next project might struggle to get off the ground, even though the Whiplash director has a first-look deal with Paramount.
We’re a month down the line from Chazelle’s comments and according to Deadline, it looks like Chazelle’s next project is now officially up and running. Story details for this one haven’t been revealed, although we do know that it will be a prison movie that the filmmaker based on an original script he’s written. As of yet, we don’t even have a title for the film.
No talent is currently attached and as such, there’s no production date yet slated for the project, although Paramount has stated that we can expect to see it arrive some time next year. Still, ever since the searing success of his debut film, Whiplash, Chazelle has never struggled to attract top-level talent to his projects, and we’re sure this project will be no different. The film will be Chazelle’s fifth directorial outing following Whiplash, La La Land, First Man and Babylon. We’ll bring you more on this one as we hear it.
