Amanda Seyfried to play Hardwicke's Red Riding Hood

Amanda Seyfried is set to don a red hood and go skipping through the woods. According to the LA Times, the Jennifer’s Body star has signed up to play the lead in The Girl With The Red Riding Hood, a modern-day take on the Brothers Grimm tale.

Seyfriend is an obvious choice for this film. Not only has she got a bona-fide box office smash under her belt (Mamma Mia!) but she's proven she can do genre as well (after a disappointing opening, Jennifer's Body has made a reasonable wordwide profit and is likely to do very well on DVD sales in the coming months). These two films, plus romantic weepie Dear John (in which she co-stars with Channing Tatum) make her a no-risk lead for a film aimed at a female audience. 

The script, which was written by David Leslie Johnson (who also wrote the Vera Farmiga/Peter Sarsgaard horror, Orphan) has had a lot of industry and online buzz, and made the 2009 Black List. It’s a contemporary adaptation of the story, with what's described as a gothic tone (what does that mean these days? Horror? An emo score? A live burial in a cellar?) and a love triangle at its heart.

Catherine Hardwicke is on board to direct and Warner Bros is clearly hoping to replicate the money-spinning formula of Twilight. Hardwicke + young actress who can act + love triangle + werewolf = ch-ching! Box office gold.

But can the quality script mitigate against the cynical way the project seems to have been put together? Twilight’s success was partly thanks to an obsessive fanbase which wanted to like the film before they’d even seen it; partly down to some canny casting (the franchise made stars out of unknowns Pattinson and Lautner); and partly because it was aimed squarely at a demographic – young women – who’ve been poorly served by films in recent times. In fact, pre-Twilight, Hollywood had all but abandoned making popular films for post-tween young women, apart from its unending churn of shiny, unfunny romantic comedies.

But forget all that – what lesson does Hollywood learn from Twilight? That chicks dig werewolves. So, they say, let’s make more films with wolves in them (vampires aren’t a sure thing any more – look at the way that Universal’s Cirque Du Freak: The Vampire’s Assistant tanked).

The burning question as far as this writer is concerned is this: will the love triangle be between Red Riding Hood, a werewolf and a lumberjack? Or is a ménage with granny in the picture?

Here's the LA Times story.

Incidentally, one of the story strands in anthology comedy/horror flick Trick 'r Treat featured Anna Paquin as a sort of Red Riding Hood, in a subverted take on the tale. And very funny it is too.