Splice director Vincenzo Natali adapting William Gibson’s Neuromancer

A movie adaptation of William Gibson’s massively influential 1984 cyberpunk novel NEUROMANCER has been in the works for ages.

Filmmaker Vincenzo Natali (CUBE, SPLICE) is the latest guy to try and rescue it from development Hell. Natali is tackling the prescient material as an ambitious Canadian indie project, and is rewriting the script himself.

Joseph Kahn (TORQUE) was the last director involved with the project, which even had cast members rumored (Hayden Christensen and Liv Tyler). Chuck Russell (THE MASK) and music vid director Chris Cunningham also made previous attempts.

The NEUROMANCER synopsis: “Case was the hottest computer cowboy cruising the information superhighway–jacking his consciousness into cyberspace, soaring through tactile lattices of data and logic, rustling encoded secrets for anyone with the money to buy his skills. Then he double-crossed the wrong people, who caught up with him in a big way–and burned the talent out of his brain, micron by micron. Banished from cyberspace, trapped in the meat of his physical body, Case courted death in the high-tech underworld. Until a shadowy conspiracy offered him a second chance — and a cure — for a price…“

Natali has also recently been linked to a new SWAMP THING movie, an adaptation of the recent “kid-friendly horror” bestseller TUNNELS and his pet project HIGH RISE, based on J.G. Ballard’s 1975 book about a class war in a tenement building.