With the success of films like Chicago and the vastly superior Moulin Rouge!, it shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone that this mini trend of broadway plays moving to the big screen is continuing.
Next up at bat is the smash hit “Rent“. The good folks aver at Monsters and Critics offer up this bit of news:
Rent is being produced for Revolution Studios by Robert DeNiro and Jane Rosenthal and 1492 Pictures’ Columbus, Mark Radcliffe and Michael Barnathan. Jeffrey Seller, Kevin McCollum, Allan S. Gordon and Lata Ryan are serving as executives producers. Julie Larson, sister of the late Jonathan Larson, serves as co-producer.
Based on Puccini’s classic opera La Boheme, Jonathan Larson’s revolutionary rock opera Rent tells the story of a group of bohemians struggling to live and pay their rent in the gritty background of New York’s East Village. “Measuring their lives in love,” these starving artists strive for success and acceptance while enduring the obstacles of poverty, illness and the AIDS epidemic.
One of the longest running shows on Broadway, “Rent” was the winner of the 1996 Pulitzer Prize for Drama, the Obie Award, the New York Drama Critics Circle Award, four Tony Awards and three Drama Desk awards.
No, I’m not getting sick of these yet. In reality there hasn’t been many of them (when you compare them to TV shows jumping to the big screen), and I have the same attitude towards them as I do to comic book films… Just keep making them well, and I’ll stay interested. Let’s see how this one turns out.
