I Am Legend Director Developing Chuck Palahniuk's Survivor Movie Adaptation

Two days ago I posted the first production photo from Choke, which premieres January at Sundance. But my posting was more of a rant about one of author Chuck Palahniuk's other novels. Everyone knows about Fight Club (despite the first rule...), and everyone has seen David Fincher's film adaptation, but what you probably don't know is that Palahniuk wrote a book called Survivor that is arguably better than Fight Club.

Survivor was being fast tracked for the big screen, but September 11th happened, and plot similarities put the project in development hell (you can read the history behind the failed film adaptation here). Online petitions were signed, Fox listened, and Chuck even announced at book signings that development work on the film had begun again. But not long after, it was reported that the project had fell back into development heck.

I'm writing to you today my friends to report some great news. I Am Legend director Francis Lawrence is back on the project.

"I'm working on the book Survivor by Chuck Palahniuk that I'm working on with a friend," Lawrence said this weekend at the I Am Legend junket. "It's a great book. I love that book. So we've been working on that."

So it appears the project is not dead after all. Francis Lawrence has a couple other projects in development:

But it sounds like he is actively working on an adaptation of Palahniuk's book, and that makes me ecstatic.

Here is the plot description from the Book's cover:

From the author of the cult sensation Fight Club (now a major motion picture starring Brad Pitt, Edward Norton, and Helena Bonham Carter) comes Survivor.

"A turbo-charged, deliciously manic satire of contemporary American life." –Newsday

"The only difference between suicide and martyrdom is press coverage," according to the "been there, done that" wisdom of Tender Branson, last surviving member of the Creedish Death Cult. At the opening of Chuck Palahniuk's hilariously unnerving second novel, Tender is cruising on autopilot, 39,000 feet up, dictating the whole of his life story into Flight 2039's "black box" in the final moments before crashing into the vast Australian outback.

Not since Kurt Vonnegut's Mother Night has there been as dark and telling a satire on the wages of fame and the bedrock lunacy of the modern world. Wickedly incisive and mesmerizing, Survivor is Chuck Palahniuk at his deadpan peak.

"Mordant...one's sympathy for the improbable, doomed hero is fully engaged." –The New Yorker

"A wild amphetamine ride through the vagaries of fame and the nature of belief."–The San Francisco Chronicle

"Convoluted, maniacally comic, partaking deeply of the America that streams towrd us in the dead of night from the cable channels–that place of outrageous expectation, slavish idolatry, fanatic consumerism, and mind-stopping banality." –Sven Birkerts, Esquire

source: Collider