Steven Soderbergh’s next film, The Bitter Pill, is fast becoming one of the most interesting projects to look forward to next year. We’ve heard some great things about the project already, which has Rooney Mara, Jude Law, Channing Tatum, and Catherine Zeta-Jones attached already, with Soderbergh directing from a script by collaborator Scott Z. Burns.
Variety are now reporting the great news that Entertainment One have pre-bought the rights to the film for UK and Canada at the European Film Market, with a host of other distributors acquiring the rights to pretty much everywhere else across the globe, including Germany, Australia, Eastern Europe, Scandinavia, Switzerland, Latin America, Indonesia, South Korea, South Africa, and many more markets, with Open Road distributing the film out in the States.
Whilst I was hoping that Blake Lively would be staying on in the female lead, the Oscar-nominated Rooney Mara (whose nomination could turn into a win before long) is an excellent choice to come on board in Lively’s place. Mara will be starring as,
“a troubled young woman who develops a dangerous love triangle between her doctor (Law) and her newly paroled husband (Tatum),”
and who uses a large amount of prescription drugs to deal with her anxiety and depression surrounding her husband’s release.
The project has been known both as The Bitter Pill and The Side Effects, and until now it was somewhat unclear as to what exactly it would be called. But hopefully we can safely say that now that the rights have been bought, its name has been settled on as The Bitter Pill, as per Variety’s report.
Lorenzo di Bonaventura (Transformers, Red, Constantine) will be producing alongside Soderbergh’s frequent producer and first assistant director, Gregory Jacobs (Contagion, Ocean’s Eleven, Soderbergh’s upcoming Magic Mike).
The film is set to be Soderbergh’s penultimate time directing, with his upcoming Liberace biopic Behind the Candelabra to be his last, and is scheduled to go into production in April ahead of a summer production for his final film. With that schedule in mind, hopefully we can look forward to seeing The Bitter Pill before long, because it sounds like it has a lot of potential, and the host of rights pre-bought across the globe at the EFM would certainly suggest that distributors are in agreement. More news as we get it.
