Director David Cronenberg’s 2014 Consumed novel could become a TV or film, as the filmmaker says he’s adapting the script.
In 2014, Canadian filmmaker David Cronenberg became a novelist with Consumed, a characteristically uneasy book about the relationship between cold technology and fleshy humans.
Currently on the promotional trail for his new film, The Shrouds, Cronenberg has suggested that Consumed could eventually become a TV or film, since he’s currently adapting it into a script.
In an interview with Variety (with a hat-tip to World of Reel), the filmmaker has said that the catalyst for the adaptation is Robert Lantos, the producer he’s regularly collaborated with in the past, from 1996’s Crash to 2022’s Crimes Of The Future.
“We’re talking about possibly doing a movie based on my novel Consumed,” Cronenberg said. “[Lantos has] wanted to turn that either into a series or a movie for some years, and he’s kind of convinced me that it would be good if I gave it a shot. So I’m working on a script for my own book, which is quite interesting.”
Consumed takes in freelance video journalists, surgeons and philosophers, cannibalism and rare sexually-transmitted diseases, not to mention an obsession with describing tech and gadgets in the kind of minute detail that rivals Brett Easton-Ellis’s American Psycho. It’s a risky subject for a TV show or film not just because of its global locations, which take in Canada, Europe and Japan, but also because of its disturbing – and distinctly Cronenbergian – subject matter.
In his interview with Variety, Cronenberg asks himself whether a Consumed adaptation could be financed in the current climate, admitting, “It wouldn’t be cheap, it takes place in four countries, so of course we can’t tell right now. But that’s where it might go.”
Even at the age of 82, the director of Shivers, The Fly and more besides still has the ability to unnerve financiers. At one stage, his deeply personal drama The Shrouds was destined for Netflix; he got as far as shooting a pilot – or what the company preferred to call a ‘prototype’ – for the proposed series before executives politely nixed the idea.
“It wasn’t what we fell in love with in the room,” was how one Netflix exec put it, according to Cronenberg. “I thought that was a very Hollywood thing to say,” the filmmaker told TheWrap. “I was hoping that Netflix would not be like old Hollywood, but would be a little more edgy or a little more understanding.”
Rather than wither from existence entirely, The Shrouds was instead reborn as a feature film, with Vincent Cassel playing a grieving tech entrepreneur who invents a modern kind of grave where clients can watch their loved one slowly decompose inside their casket. If that rather unique concept can still get made in such a conservative climate, maybe Cronenberg will be similarly fortunate with Consumed.
The Shrouds doesn’t appear to have a UK release date yet, though it’s out on the 30th April in France if you have access to a plane. We’ll update you with a date on these isles should we get one.
