Or maybe a goose with a grudge, or a sparrow with sanguine intent. The point is, Snook is about to have to fight a whole fuck-ton of birds, as Deadline reports that she’s signed on for a TV remake of… The Birds.
Admittedly, the TV treatment—written by former The Leftovers and Watchmen scribe Tom Spezialy—sounds like it’ll travel pretty far afield from both Daphne du Maurier’s original short story, and its famed 1963 adaptation by Alfred Hitchcock, moving the action to Alaska and incorporating elements of a murder mystery. But none of that will probably stop it from getting to the avian money shot, as it were, when Snook and her castmates are forced to fend off the forces of nature, sharp in beak and claw.
People have been trying to re-adapt The Birds pretty steadily over the last few decades, most notably with a film adaptation (set to star Naomi Watts) in 2007, and a BBC TV adaptation planned in 2017. (Much like the genuinely terrifying hordes of birds in du Maurier’s original story, these things apparently move with the tides.) This latest version is being produced at Universal International Studios, which previously produced All Her Fault, and will see Snook playing a traveling magistrate whose investigation of a murder gets suddenly interrupted by god knows how many rampaging roseate spoonbills. It’s not clear why so many Birds adaptations have failed in recent years—we suspect it has something to do with how much it costs to make the whole premise look as terrifying as du Maurier wrote it, instead of cheesy and dumb—but turning the story into a TV series should give Snook plenty of time to look appropriately harried while a feral finch or an obstreperous owl attempts to give her what-for.
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