Time for another Hollywood remake of a successful French thriller from the last few years back, you say?

Early this year saw the 2008 French film Pour Elle (Anything for Her) remodelled for an US audience and retitled The Next Three Days. Starring Russell Crowe and Elizabeth Banks, the film did extremely modest business in the States and over here, but that hasn’t stopped Warner Bros and Universal Pictures from acquiring the rights to the novel which was the source material for another hit French mainstream drama/thriller, Tell No One.

To be fair, the book was written by popular US mystery writer Harlan Coben before being sculpted into a rather cracking foreign-language film in 2006, and The Hollywood Reporter claims that the book was originally set up at Sony as far back as 2002.

To further ease any worries, Hollywood’s newly rechristened golden child, Ben Affleck, is attached to direct, with a script by Chris Terrio (the writer on the director’s next big project with Warner, entitled Argo) and past Spielberg collaborators, Kathleen Kennedy and Frank Marshall, are also onboard as producers.

The signs are looking good on this one. The story of a paediatrician who begins to receive mysterious emails showing the wife he believed was brutally murdered eight years ago, older and very much alive, is a great premise for a film, and given Affleck’s recent success where he’s proved a strong presence both in front and behind the camera, we could be looking at a strong companion piece to the original version, rather than a pale imitation.