WTF: Paramount Developing AFTER, Which Started As One Direction Fan Fiction

It's no secret that Paramount Pictures has been playing catch-up to the other major studios for awhile now. They simply don't release as many films as the others, and they only have two proven franchises: Transformers and Mission: Impossible. But I had no idea they were this desperate for a hit.

/Film reports that the studio is developing a film called After, which — like Fifty Shades of Grey before it — started out as a piece of fan fiction. Anna Todd wrote a piece of fanfic about the teen pop band One Direction, and it gained over one billion reads on Wattpad. Simon and Schuster's Gallery Books picked it up, made a few changes (including character names), and published it last year.

Also like Fifty Shades of GreyAfter centers around the steamy but rocky romance between a virginal student (here named Tessa) and an emotionally unavailable bad boy (here named Hardin, and loosely modeled after One Direction band member Harry Styles).

Well, to say that Paramount hopes to recapture the success of Fifty Shades of Grey would be perhaps the most obvious statement in the world, but here we are. I guess I shouldn't be surprised that they'd try to do that by going after a younger teenaged audience. And while this sounds like an absolutely terrible idea creatively, I'm sure it'll make them lots of money, so...yeah. Welcome to Hollywood in 2015. Susan McMartin (CBS's Mom, Two and a Half Men) has been hired to write the screenplay. No director is attached, and there's no word on who will star.

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