Up-and-coming studio mogul Ryan Kavanaugh’s Relativity Media announced today that it has acquired the distribution rights to The Raven, a mystery-thriller starring John Cusack as a fictional version of American writer and poet Edgar Allen Poe.
‘The Raven,’ now in post-production, was directed by James McTeigue (V for Vendetta) with a script from television actor Ben Livingston and writer Hannah Shakespeare. In McTeigue’s creative re-imagining, Poe (Cusack) is frantically trying to hunt down a serial killer inspired by his often dark poems. Luke Evans, Brendan Gleeson, Alice Eve and Oliver Jackson-Cohen also star in the period thriller.
This isn’t the first time that Poe has been fictionalized as a character. The 19th-century poet has often appeared in literature or film as a tormented artist, reflecting the dark characters Poe himself liked to invent for his Gothic stories. And fictional versions of the writer often possess the sleuthing skills Poe liked to give his characters in his own mystery novels, so the The Raven’s Poe-as-serial-killer-hunter plot, strange as it may sound, isn’t without some precedent.
Wishing for a Cusack sighting,
And reading Cusack wiki-lore,
Quoth the Raven, “NEVERMORE.”
Sorry, got away from myself there for a second.
No release date has been set.
Source: THR
