Ron Howard To Direct Thriller THE GIRL BEFORE

With In the Heart of the Sea set to debut in just a few days, director Ron Howard is already locking down another directing gig.

Deadline reports that Universal has snagged the rights to J.P. Delaney's upcoming novel The Girl Before and has hired Howard to direct a film adaptation. The book — which is apparently suspected to have actually been written by bestselling author Tony Strong, who used a pen name here — is being called a "Hitchcockian thriller" that's a "haunting portrayal of the darkest shades of obsession." The book won't even be published until next year, but Deadline has a quick synopsis:

In The Girl Before, a traumatized woman falls in love with an extraordinary minimalist house and with the man who designed it. But when she discovers that three years earlier another damaged woman died here, she starts to wonder if her own story is just a re-run of the girl before.

Sounds like this might share some DNA with another upcoming thriller that's being compared to Hitchcock and has "Girl" in the title: Tate Taylor's The Girl on the Train, starring Emily Blunt.

Howard has directed some undeniably terrific movies, but as my cinematic tastes continue to change, I'm finding myself less and less interested in the films he makes. He seems to gravitate toward middle-of-the-road, four-quadrant blockbusters, and while there's obviously a big desire for those in the marketplace right now, they often seem like they're almost too mainstream, to the point where they can become a little bland. That's not a slight against Howard, it's just where my opinion stands on him at the moment, but I'd love to hear what you all think of him as a director. And hey — at least he didn't direct The Phantom Menace.