‘Interview With the Vampire’ Director Josh Boone Might Be Threatening to Cast Jared Leto in the Reboot
Over the last few days, Josh Boone shared some photos seemingly unveiling his lineup for X-Men spinoff New Mutants, but that’s not the only thing he revealed. The director of The Fault in Our Stars also posted a photo of the title page for his screenplay for the reboot of Interview With the Vampire. Boone followed that with another photo update, which may or may not be part of some weird joke. It’s kind of hard to tell with social media sometimes, you know?
About two years ago, Universal announced plans to reboot The Vampire Chronicles, with Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman producing a new series of films based on Anne Rice’s beloved horror novels. That includes a reboot of Interview With the Vampire, and judging by Boone’s Instagram post from last week, it looks as though his screenplay takes inspiration from that novel along with The Vampire Lestat:
Boone was reportedly in talks to write and direct the reboot a couple of years ago, but we haven’t really heard much since then. As to who might follow in Tom Cruise’s footsteps in the role of the vampire Lestat, Boone shared this tweet — with no further explanation:
“There can be only one” is a reference to Highlander, so who knows what’s going on here. Is he joking? Or is Boone just sharing a bit of wishful thinking? Or — and here’s the big one — has Boone actually cast Jared Leto in the role of Lestat? If it’s the latter, then prepare for some intensely mixed reactions from fans. You remember what happened when Leto was cast as The Joker in Suicide Squad.
Anyway, there’s no real timetable for Universal’s Interview With the Vampire reboot, as Boone is also writing and (likely) directing New Mutants for Fox, along with an adaptation of Stephen King’s Revival for Warner Bros. In a recent interview with Nightmare Magazine, Boone said it could be quite a while before the reboot hits theaters:
With any of these projects that are so big and expensive like Vampire Chronicles or The Stand, it’ll probably take a couple of years for any of these things to come together and actually get made just because of how expensive it is to bring these properties to the screen and how complicated the adaptation process is. We have a vision for a trilogy of Vampire Chronicles films, and I hope also a spinoff television series to explore all the side characters and their back stories. That’s the dream. We’ll see what happens.
Like his long-developing adaptation of Stephen King’s The Stand, The Vampire Chronicles is also being planned as a franchise with a potential television series tie-in — though last we heard, The Stand will now probably become two films once they get the rights cleared up.