As Fox’s projects begin to be unloaded and picked up by different studios, the first project that has come unglued from Fox since the Disney acquisition has been confirmed by Deadline. Universal Pictures has picked up rights to The News of The World, an adaptation of the Paulette Jiles novel that is re-teaming Captain Phillips’ director Paul Greengrass and star Tom Hanks. The film will be written by Lion’s Luke Davies, and will be based the novel that is set in 1870. The films premise will revolve,
around a road trip through the untamed West taken by unlikely traveling partners. On the one hand is Captain Jefferson Kyle Kidd, a Texan who travels from town to town to read the news to locals who would otherwise not know what is going on in the world. While Kidd’s idea of excitement is spreading the word of the passage of the 15th Amendment that gave voting rights to all men, he gets a jolt when he agrees to escort a 10-year-old white girl to her aunt and uncle in San Antonio after she was rescued from the Kiowa Indian tribe that kidnapped her and killed her family four years earlier. His traveling partner is an ornery youngster who didn’t want to be rescued and brought to her relatives. Together they face the inhospitable frontier.
No work on release date as of yet.
