Consumed: David Cronenberg plans on turning his debut novel into a movie

News that David Cronenberg was turning his debut novel “Consumed” into a series first made the rounds in 2017 when it was believed that AMC would be picking it up. Unfortunately, that never came to be and now Cronenberg is revealing that the novel was going to be turned into a potential series on Netflix but now he has plans to turn it into a movie.

During a chat with Variety, Cronenberg went into what happened with Consumed after it made the move to Netflix. Cronenberg said, “I tried and we got to two episodes and then [Netflix] decided not to do it. And I was disappointed because I was interested in streaming in cinematic terms. I thought that would be a very interesting experience for me as a writer, as a creator, and then also as a director. And maybe I’ll have that experience one day…”

Despite not moving ahead at Netflix, the project is not dead and is likely to now take shape as a film. Cronenberg continued by saying, “So the project that I was talking to Netflix about, it will be a feature film instead. I don’t have a screenplay yet for that but I will be writing that.”

Cronenberg’s thoughts on Netflix were also pretty interesting. It appears that he was very interested in working with them in the beginning because he believed they wouldn’t be like a typical Hollywood studio but he found them to ultimately be very conservative:

“I think my feeling is I really was very interested in the whole Netflix streaming phenomenon, definitely. But I think that they’re still very conservative. I mean, I think they’re still like a Hollywood studio. I thought maybe they would be different. The difference is that Netflix can show very interesting streaming series from Korea, from Finland, and they say it’s a Netflix original, but it isn’t really — it’s something they have acquired. But I think when it comes to their actual production that they do themselves, they’re very conservative. I think they think in mainstream terms, that’s my experience with them anyway.”

“Consumed” was published back in 2015 and it serves as Cronenberg’s debut novel. Per the novel’s official plot description, “Stylish and camera-obsessed, Naomi and Nathan thrive on the yellow journalism of the social-media age. Naomi finds herself drawn to the headlines surrounding a famous couple, Célestine and Aristide, Marxist philosophers and sexual libertines. Célestine has been found dead, and Aristide has disappeared. Police suspect him of killing her and consuming parts of her body. Yet Naomi sets off to find him, and as she delves deeper into the couple’s lives, she discovers the news story may only skim the surface of the disturbing acts they performed together. Journalist Nathan, meanwhile, is in Budapest photographing the controversial work of an unlicensed surgeon named Zoltán Molnár, once sought by Interpol for organ trafficking. After sleeping with one of Molnár’s patients, Nathan contracts a rare STD called Roiphe’s and travels to Toronto, determined to meet the man who discovered the syndrome. Dr. Barry Roiphe, Nathan learns, now studies his own adult daughter, whose bizarre behavior masks a devastating secret.”

Do YOU think Consumed will work better as a feature film?