Warner Bros. Is Frontrunner To Adapt Donna Tartt’s The Goldfinch

Though Donna Tartt’s Pulitzer Prize-winning, bestselling novel The Goldfinch, her first in 11 years, was originally being shopped as a TV miniseries (not that surpising if you’re familiar with its story), we’re now hearing that Warner Bros. is the studio with the best chance of snagging rights to adapt the novel into a feature film.

Warner Bros. reportedly made a competitive offer for The Goldfinch, though complicating things is the fact that the studio that lands adaptation rights in the end will have to play by Tartt’s rules – the author is seeking to be actively involved in creative decisions on The Goldfinch. Essentially, if the author doesn’t like the way that production is going, she reserves the right to scuttle it and return to shopping her novel for the small screen.

Tartt’s novel, an adventure story, spans two decades and focuses on a young man who steals the valuable painting of the title, only to later encounter the alcoholic father who abandoned him, an event which changes the path of his life. The Amazon synopsis reads as follows:

Theo Decker, a 13-year-old New Yorker, miraculously survives an accident that kills his mother. Abandoned by his father, Theo is taken in by the family of a wealthy friend. Bewildered by his strange new home on Park Avenue, disturbed by schoolmates who don’t know how to talk to him, and tormented above all by his longing for his mother, he clings to the one thing that reminds him of her: a small, mysteriously captivating painting that ultimately draws Theo into the underworld of art.

As an adult, Theo moves silkily between the drawing rooms of the rich and the dusty labyrinth of an antiques store where he works. He is alienated and in love–and at the center of a narrowing, ever more dangerous circle.

The Goldfinch is a mesmerizing, stay-up-all-night and tell-all-your-friends triumph, an old-fashioned story of loss and obsession, survival and self-invention, and the ruthless machinations of fate.

Personally, I’d rather see The Goldfinch adapted into a miniseries on HBO or Netflix, where Tartt wouldn’t have to worry about tightening up her sizable novel (it clocks in at 784 pages). Nothing has been confirmed with Warner Bros. yet, but we should know something about the fate of The Goldfinch sometime in the next few weeks.