Paul Giamatti will star in a TV version of Eli Roth’s grisly Hostel franchise. Both Roth and the films’ original producers will be involved in the new series.
A gold star to anyone who saw this coming.
Paul Giamatti, of Billions and Big Fat Liar fame, as well as his collaborations with Alexander Payne including Sideways and this year’s wonderful drama The Holdovers (pictured), is starring in a television version of Eli Roth’s Hostel, which is not a sentence I expected to type today.
It seems this collaboration has been on the cards for some time. Giamatti told Entertainment Weekly in a 2013 interview that “Eli was shooting Hostel in Prague and I was shooting The Illusionist and I met him. We talked about me actually killing somebody in that movie but it never panned out”.
Hostel is a film often, and perhaps quite rightly in the case of its sequel, tarred with the term ‘torture porn’, due to its grisly scenes of unrelenting gore. Three films have been produced thus far, each containing more horrific violence than the last. The first film was released in 2005, with the sequel arriving two years later in 2007. The last film in the series was 2011’s Hostel 3, and since then fans have petitioned for a continuation.
They’re in luck, because this looks like a series very much made for the fans. The Hollywood Reporter says that Roth is co-writing with original film producer Chris Briggs, with fellow film producer Mike Feiss also involved. There are no plot details, but it is described as “an elevated thriller and a modern reinvention of the horror franchise”. There is currently no network or streaming service attached.
Roth’s next film is an adaptation of the hit shooter videogame series Borderlands starring Jack Black, Cate Blanchett, Kevin Hart and Jamie Lee Curtis. It will be released in UK cinemas on the 9th August. Giamatti will next be seen as part of the ensemble cast of Julian Fellowes Downton Abbey 3. That starts shooting later this year.
