Following his huge win at the Director's Guild Awards, The King's Speech director Tom Hooper is the frontrunner to take home the Best Director prize at the Academy Awards on Sunday. Should it come to pass - and, frankly, even if it doesn't - Hooper is going to be hounded by studios trying to get him to make their next big film. Last year, Kathryn Bigelow, who won the prize thanks to her work on The Hurt Locker, received many offers, including the Spider-Man prequel, but turned them down in favor of her passion project Triple Frontier. So what projects are now on Tom Hooper's radar?
The LA Times recently spoke with "a person who has worked closely with Hooper," one offer put in front of the director was Iron Man 3, though he declined, making way for Shane Black to take the helm (is it now a requirement that Oscar nominated directors turn down Marvel movies?). But while Hooper may not want to fly around with Robert Downey Jr. in a gold-titanium alloy suit, another source says that he may be eying a film adaptation of Les Misérables. Unlike the 1998 version, which starred King's Speech Oscar nominee Geoffrey Rush, the new movie would be a big-budget musical. Since wrapping The King's Speech early last year Hooper has not accepted any other projects.
Whatever Hooper decides to do, let's just hope he moves quickly on it. After seeing her stock rise higher than ever before, we're still waiting on Bigelow's next film to go into production. If Hooper wants to keep his name in the trades he needs to strike while the iron is hot.
