Cary Fukunaga to Adapt “The Black Count”

In this week’s edition of “How many projects can Cary Fukunaga juggle?”, word comes from Deadline that he will be adding an adaptation of The Black Count to his repertoire of films in his pipeline. Fukunaga will reportedly write and direct the adaptation, with musical artist John Legend of all people producing. Like so many others, I read their names in the headlines for this and was a bit disappointed Legend wasn’t doing a True Detective concept album.

The biography recounts the epic life of Alex Dumas, whose son Alexandre would then base The Three Musketeers off of his father’s exploits. Born to a slave mother and french nobleman father, Dumas went on to become the highest ranking person of color to serve in any European army, and was favored by Napoleon.

Fukunaga has gone 3-3 in my book so far. Sin Nombre, Jane Eyre and this year’s HBO mega-hit True Detective were all masterclasses in aesthetic and tone by Fukunaga. Coming off the massive success of True Detective, Fukunaga has had no shortage of opportunities and has been lining up several projects, all of which sound intriguing. He’ll start shooting his African civil war drama Beasts of No Nation with Idris Elba next month. Supposedly afterwards he’ll move on to his two film adaptation of It, and after that it seems it is fair game between Noble Assassin, A Soldier of the Great War and The Black Count. While I’m game for anything Fukunaga does, I worry that he is stretching himself too thin and that most of these projects will unfortunately fall by the wayside into development hell.

Source: Deadline