Legendary Magician Harry Houdini Is Getting a Film From the Producers of TRANSFORMERS
Transformers producers Lorenzo Di Bonaventura and Mark Vahradian are developing a new film for Paramount Pictures about legendary magician Harry Houdini. There have been several Houdini projects that have gone into development over the years, but the only one that I believe actually got made was a History Channel miniseries back in 2014 with Adrien Brody.
There’s not a lot of information on this next film project, but it’s said to be set in the early 20th Century “and have a Sherlock Holmes tone, dealing as it does with a human superhero type.” The script for the movie is being written by Neil Widener (Now You See Me 3) and Gavin James.
Houdini, a.k.a. Erik Weisz, “was the Hungarian-American stunt performer and mysteriarch, noted for his escape acts and his rags-to-riches immigrant story. He first attracted notice in vaudeville in the US and then as “Harry ‘Handcuff’ Houdini” on a tour of Europe, where he challenged police forces to keep him locked up. Soon he extended his repertoire to include chains, ropes slung from skyscrapers and straitjackets under water. Another stunt saw him buried alive and only just able to claw himself to the surface, emerging in a state of near-breakdown.”
I’m a huge fan of Houdini and was obsessed with learning about his history for years. I was reading and watching everything I could about the magician. I wish I had more details to share with you, but a couple of the other projects that never got made also sounded interesting.
One project in particular that I was excited about was being developed by Dan Trachtenberg, the director of 10 Cloverfield Lane. It was a Houdini biopic, and Ben Affleck signed on to star in it. The movie was based on William Kalush and Larry Sloman’s book The Secret Life of Houdini: The Making of America’s First Superhero.
That story dives into some interesting and cool details about Houdini’s life. It draws from millions of pages of research and “describes in vivid detail the passions that drove Houdini to perform ever-more-dangerous feats, his secret life as a spy, and a pernicious plot to subvert his legacy.”
The Secret Life of Houdini traces “the arc of the master magician’s life from desperate poverty to worldwide fame—his legacy later threatened by a group of fanatical Spiritualists led by esteemed British author Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.” One of the more interesting aspects involves the belief that he was a British spy, in cahoots with police organizations, and at one point was even asked to be an adviser to Czar Nicholas II's court in pre-revolutionary Russia. These are real theories about the magician, and this movie will elaborate on those stories.
The studio's plan for that film was to make it an action-thriller in which Houdini will be portrayed as part Indiana Jones and part Sherlock Holmes. I don’t think that project is happening anymore. But it would be interesting if this new film was an iteration of that. We’ll just have to wait and see.
Source: Deadline