Stephen King fans were delivered a big fat bummer last week when it was reported that The Outsider won't be getting a second season at HBO – but the silver lining is that King's works are incredibly hot right now. While we may not get to see a continuation of that particular story, the industry on the whole is very keen on making adaptations at the moment, and so announcements about new developments have become frequent. Hence we now have this amazing bit of news: director Lynne Ramsay has been tapped to make a big screen version of the 1999 novel The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon.
The project first started gaining traction this past spring when it was announced that Village Roadshow had started developing the feature, but this is obviously a big step forward. In addition to directing, Ramsay is also set to co-write the script for the adaptation, according to The Hollywood Reporter, and will be working with Christy Hall (the co-creator of Netflix's under-appreciated series I Am Not Okay With This).
The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon is a survivor tale/psychological horror novel that follows a nine-year-old girl named Trisha McFarland who gets lost when she goes out hiking with her brother and recently-divorced mother. A clever kid, she uses he smarts to survive, and keeps her sprits up listening to a baseball game featuring her favorite player, pitcher Tom Gordon, on her Walkman, but her problems become exponentially greater with time, and making matters worse is that she begins to have what seem like hallucinatory visions in the forest.
Lynne Ramsay is an exceptionally exciting choice to make the adaptation based on her past work, which showcase a dark sensibility that should be a fantastic match for the material. For those who aren't familiar with her work, she made her feature debut in 1999 with the acclaimed Ireland-set drama Ratcatcher, and she followed that up with 2002's Morvern Callar, but her big breakout came in 2011 with the release of the utterly disturbing thriller We Need To Talk About Kevin, starring Tilda Swinton and Ezra Miller.
That was followed up by the excellent You Were Never Really Here starring Joaquin Phoenix in 2017, and if all goes according to plan it looks like The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon will be her fifth movie.
The trade report says that the plan is for production to go into full swing next year, so that probably means that we can expect it to arrive in 2022 – but obviously nothing is set in stone. We'll certainly keep a close eye on the project as it continues to move throw development, so stay tuned here on CinemaBlend for the latest updates about the Girl Who Loves Tom Gordon adaptation.
