Universal snagged the rights to the popular play after what The Hollywood Reporter characterized as “a competitive situation.” Sadie Sink, who also earned a Tony nomination for her work in the piece (which she just departed last weekend), will join Fey and Platt on the production side.
Anyone who read Arthur Miller’s The Crucible in high school will likely recognize the name John Proctor. That’s the same John the title is referring to, but John Proctor Is The Villain isn’t a direct adaptation by any means. (Although, a Lorde-soundtracked Crucible would be pretty fun.) Instead, the 2018-set story follows a group of Georgia teens who study the play in their high school English class, and use it as a lens to process the impact of the #MeToo movement and their own relationships with men—their fathers, teachers, and classmates—in their small community.
Kimberly Bellflower, who wrote the stage production, will return to write the screenplay. No casting has been announced as of this writing, meaning we don’t yet know if Sink will reprise her role in addition to her production duties. THR‘s announcement also didn’t specify whether or not the movie would include that pivotal “Green Light” needle drop, but it’s kind of hard to imagine the story without it. “Extremely early on, I was like, ‘This ends in a dance to ‘Green Light,'” Bellflower told Marie Claire in May.
“In The Crucible, the inciting incident is that these girls go out dancing in the woods,” she continued. “Knowing that, Oh, that is an ancient thing, it’s not just a modern phenomenon with pop music. It is as old as we are as a culture… I think the play is so much about how cycles repeat themselves, like cycles of power, cycles of hierarchy, but also cycles of abuse and of pop music and of dancing. Over and over again, these things happen.” Now, fans will get to experience John Proctor Is The Villain over and over again as well—even after the play takes its final bow on Broadway on August 31.
