Details for Academy Award-winning filmmaker Jordan Peele’s next film have surfaced, and this one sounds terrific. Peele won the Oscar for Best Original Screenplay for Get Out, his directorial debut, and there’s been considerable interest around what he’d do next. While he’s no doubt been approached by the Marvel’s and the DC’s (and turned down Warner Bros.' Akira), he committed to making another “social thriller” for Universal Pictures, and now Peele is revealing the title and poster while casting details have also surfaced.
The film is called Us, and is described on the poster as “A New Nightmare from the Mind of Academy Award Winner Jordan Peele,” which is possibly the best tagline in history. Additionally, Variety reports that Oscar winner Lupita Nyong’o is in talks to star with Elisabeth Moss and Black Panther breakout Winston Duke eyed for two other lead roles.
Plot details are being kept firmly under wraps, but around the time of Get Out’s release Peele said he had ideas for a number of other “social thrillers” and that this next movie for Universal would be one of them:
“I wanna stay in the genre. While I was developing [Get Out] I was also simultaneously developing four other projects that I call social thrillers. Each one is meant to deal with a different human demon; a different monster that sort of lurks underneath the way that we interact with one another as human beings. So I hope to soon direct another one of these social thrillers—it’s not gonna be about race, it’ll be about something else, but it’s gonna be very cinematic and fun… To come up with the perfect monster for a horror movie we really need to look no further than the monster that is all of us. Not so much an individual psycho killer, but the humanity that gets lost between us.”
Given the cast and this statement, one wonders if Peele will now be taking on misogyny. If so, you couldn’t ask for two better leads than Nyong’o and Moss.
One curious thing to note about this new film: It’s not being produced by Blumhouse. Peele is producing through his own Monkeypaw Productions, and I wonder if the budget for Us is larger and thus out of the normal range of Blumhouse movies. Whatever the case, I can’t wait to see it when it hits theaters on March 15, 2019. Check out the poster below.
