Warner Bros. lands rights to Playground with Timothée Chalamet eyed to star

Chalamet is also on board to produce adaptation of the AI-themed bestseller.

By Drew Gillis  |  March 20, 2026 | 4:10pm
Screenshot: MTV/YouTube
Film News Timothée Chalamet
Warner Bros. lands rights to Playground with Timothée Chalamet eyed to star

Timothée Chalamet may have had a tough award season, and Club Chalamet may be taking a break from him, but the rest of Hollywood isn’t. Deadline reports today that Chalamet is eyed to star in an adaptation of Playground, based on the New York Times bestselling novel by Richard Powers. Warner Bros. won the rights to the novel with Chalamet, Plan B, and Brian Swardstrom to produce. The project will now begin development, which means there’s no star officially set, but Chalamet would get first dibs once it is developed. 

Playground was published in 2024 and was longlisted for the Booker Prize. The plot follows Todd Keane and his friends as they grow up in Illinois and live through the Silicon Valley tech boom. Themes include “love, friendship and the rapid advancement of artificial intelligence,” per Deadline. Powers won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction for his 2018 novel The Overstory, which, at one point, was being developed for Netflix with Hugh Jackman, David Benioff, and D.B. Weiss. 

Outside of Playground, Chalamet’s still got another Dune on the horizon, which is now officially set to open opposite Avengers: Doomsday. Last year, Paramount also picked up a project from Chalamet and A Complete Unknown director James Mangold about “a series of bank robberies on superbikes.” Even if Marty wasn’t ultimately Supreme, Chalamet is staying busy. 

 
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