Ari Aster, the director behind Hereditary and Midsommar, is re-teaming with A24 for another horror movie.
The filmmaker is teaming up with the Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Michael R. Jackson for the new project, which is still reportedly in the early stages of development. It's currently untitled and doesn't have a release date. This will be Aster's first feature film that he hasn't also written as well as directed.
Aster's next offering, Disappointment Blvd., is also an A24 joint and will star Joaquin Phoenix. Specific details are being kept under wraps, but the plot is described as “an intimate, decades-spanning portrait of one of the most successful entrepreneurs of all time” – who we can guess will be played by Phoenix. It's set for release in 2022.
Disappointment Blvd. seems like it will be a change of pace for Aster, who's made a name for himself with his unsettling horror movies and their disturbing images and creepy scores. His debut feature, 2018's Hereditary, stars Toni Collette, Alex Wolff, Milly Shapiro, and Gabriel Byrne, and it's about a family trying to outrun their sinister fate after the death of their secretive matriarch.His second movie, Midsommar, was released in 2019 and follows a group of American tourists' encounters with a Swedish pagan cult – and the tragic, disturbing consequences that ensue. Florence Pugh, Jack Reynor, William Jackson Harper, and Will Poulter star.
Jackson, meanwhile, is known for his off-Broadway musical A Strange Loop, which premiered in 2019 and follows a Black gay writer who works as a Broadway usher while ghostwriting a stage play for Tyler Perry. A Strange Loop won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 2020. Jackson is currently working on a new musical titled White Girl in Danger, and his collaboration with Aster will be his first time writing for the big screen.
