Edgar Wright decided on Grasshopper Jungle thanks to a Facebook comment

Last Updated on August 2, 2021

Edgar Wright has his next project, BABY DRIVER, safely in his sights. The movie has been described as a collision of crime, action, music and sound. So your guess is as good as mine when it comes to what we he's doing with that one. Beyond that, he's working on an adaptation of Andrew Smith‘s YA novel "Grasshopper Jungle" where a teenager accidentally unleashes a plague of hungry, horny, six-foot-tall praying mantises on the world. As you do.

The combination of science fiction, humor and an unusual  romance angle sounds like a perfect combination for Wright, but funny enough it was a Facebook comment that reminded him of the novel he once told himself he should check out.

Wright explained to Vulture how he got involved in the project:

I’ll tell you what, here’s what genuinely happened. On Facebook, somebody whom I don’t really know that well said, ‘Edgar Wright, you have to make a movie of Grasshopper Jungle.’ And then underneath, Matt Tolmach — who had the rights to it — wrote, ‘I agree.’ And then Andrew Smith said, ‘I also agree!’ So I emailed Matt and said, ‘Send me this book.’ What’s weird is that I’d actually read an Entertainment Weekly review of it on a plane, and they gave it an A-minus, and I remember thinking, Oh, that sounds like my cup of tea. I must get that book. And I promptly forgot about it until this Facebook thing came up. There’d never been this much pressure to love a book, but even ten pages into it, I thought, This is great.

The aforementioned romance angle in the story involves Austin, our protagonist, caught in a love triangle with his girlfriend and his male best friend. Wright has promised that the movie version of GRASSHOPPER JUNGLE will retain that aspect saying "That's kind of a deal-breaker, right? If you took something like that out, the fans of the book would be in an uproar."

BABY DRIVER has yet to begin shooting so we will be waiting a few years until GRASSHOPPER JUNGLE is released. That gives me time to check this book out, it sounds pretty awesome. Have you read the YA novel? What did you think?