Pride and Prejudice and Zombies wants to eat your money

How better to make your cultural mark than by giving some musty, dog-eared literary classic a sprightly postmodern zeitgeist of a makeover? I suppose you could always make up something brilliantly original yourself, but that sounds too much like hard work. And hard work is for losers, man! So on that note, we today bring you an update on the Pride and Prejudice and Zombies movie.

For those not in the know, out of the loop, or who just happened to be out of the room at the time, Pride and Prejudice and Zombies is a novel by Seth Grahame-Smith which was released this year, to much excitement from nitwits who have only tiny, teeny little brains and need their conceptual dinner fed to them in equivalently monatomic portions. The basic premise was: here is Jane Austen's light romantic comedy of manners, here are some zombies, put 'em together and – hey presto! We got ourselves a money-hoovering smash! Whammy! And seeing as the title of Grahame-Smith's tome is essentially just a high-concept one-liner for a movie (combining two beloved Hollywood institutions – frightfully prim Miss Austen and homicidal shambling cadavers), it is no surprise that work is already well under way to deliver a cinematic interpretation.

Last week there was news that Natalie Portman would be producing a Pride and Prejudice and Zombies film, as well as tackling the lead role of zombie-battling Elizabeth Bennet. And the word today from Pajiba is that Three Kings and I ♥ Huckabees director David O. Russell is poised to tackle writing and directing chores. Russell has been a busy boy since he found YouTube fame for flipping out on Lily Tomlin during the making of Huckabees, tackling healthcare comedy Nailed (which The Playlist reported earlier this year was struggling to be brought to completion), and also calling the shots for Mark Wahlberg, Christian Bale, and Amy Adams on The Fighter.

Rather depressingly, this proposed Portman/Russell-guided filmic take on Pride and Prejudice and Zombies does not only suffer from the wearying deployment of zombies for what must be the nineteen trillion and eighth time in a recent movie (it's got to the point that whenever I type the z-word I have to simultaneously stick a fork in my leg to stop me slipping into a tedium-induced coma), but it is not even the sole Pride and Prejudice/genre megamix in town. Because, as we reported waaaaaaaay back in February, Elton John's Rocket Pictures is toiling on Pride and Predator, in which... oh, d'you know what? I'm going to let you riddle that little enigma out for yourself.