It’s no secret that Bong Joon-ho’s Snowpiercer hurtled through one piece of red tape after another in its journey to theaters three years ago. Much of that drama can be traced back to a disagreement between the movie’s domestic distributors, The Weinstein Company, and the illustrious South Korean filmmaker with regards to which cut would screen in the U.S.
But even after such a torrid, frustrating saga, Snowpiercer still managed to achieve cult status, along with a wave of glowing reviews, upon opening Stateside, and that legacy will soon live on through TNT’s upcoming adaptation of the chilling, apocalyptic thriller. Doctor Strange helmer Scott Derrickson has signed on to direct the network’s hour-long Snowpiercer pilot, and is expected to serve as executive producer should the spinoff get picked up to series.
It seems the wheels are finally beginning to ache into motion, too, what with confirmation that Hamilton‘s Daveed Diggs has climbed aboard to play Layton Well, a “prisoner barely surviving the harsh conditions in the tail end of the train. A quiet thinker who spends his days sniffing the industrial-waste-turned-drug Chronole and tending to his cage full of rats, Layton becomes a reluctant participant in a struggle that could upend life on the train.”
For the uninitiated, Snowpiercer is the name given to a massive train that circles around a ravaged, snow-covered track in perpetuity. It’s a grubby microcosm of society, essentially, dividing the haves and the have-nots into separate carriages some seven years after an apocalyptic ice age has transformed Earth into an inhospitable wasteland. In an effort to maintain the spirit of the original film, Joon-ho, Park Chan-wook, Lee Tae-hun, and Dooho Choi are all attached to produce TNT’s pilot, which is expected to leave the station and enter production sometime this year.
