David Fincher to make a movie about chess?

After starting his career with some slick thrillers and moving on to Oscar-nominated epic BENJAMIN BUTTON could David Fincher be entering the geek phase of his career? He recently wrapped production on the Facebook movie THE SOCIAL NETWORK and is now attached to direct PAWN SACRIFICE, a chess drama for Sony Pictures.

SACRIFICE is about the life of chess wizard Bobby Fischer, specifically the time leading up to his world championship match against Boris Spassky. Steven Knight recently wrote the script that got a lot of attention in Hollywood and Tobey Maguire quickly picked it up to produce (word is he’d also be interested in starring).

I’m being a little cheeky about either of these being “geek movies” but it does seem that Fincher is moving out of the high-concept movies that dominated the early part of his career. I’ve read SOCIAL NETWORK and while it doesn’t seem like a standard Fincher movie, it’s a brilliant script and far transcends the “Facebook movie” moniker.

In addition to SACRIFICE, Sony is also trying to get Fincher involved in THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO, the adaptation of Stieg Larsson’s bestselling novel. That may just be high hopes though as he’s listed simply as being the top choice by the studio (and really isn’t Fincher the top choice for a lot of movies in development?).