That Garth Davis directed, Florence Pugh starring feature take of Matt Haig’s The Midnight Library which Andreas first told you about; well, it’s been won by the David Ellison run Paramount Pictures for $36M.

Paramount beat out Focus and Sony who were circling to acquire North America and select foreign markets on the project. StudioCanal will retain rights in UK, France, Germany, Italy, Poland, Benelux, Australia, NZ and South Africa. The deal isn’t closed as Paramount and StudioCanal are still settling territories. While this feature could be conceived as an awards play for Paramount, England and Europe are the best territories for the novel and StudioCanal is retaining exactly where this movie will excel. Hopefully this isn’t another case of overpaid prestige movies which have a hard time at the fall North American box office. Clearly, the economics didn’t sound right for two other studios. At $70M it’s the biggest European production in some time. Pre-production is expected to begin this autumn with a shoot at the onset of next year.

As Andreas mentioned, this is the biggest deal out of the Cannes market, ahead of the Park Chan-wook movie The Brigands Of Rattlecreek which went to Warner’s Clockwork for $30M; that pic starring Oscar winner Matthew McConaughey (Interstellar), Oscar nominee Austin Butler (Dune: Part Two), four-time Emmy nominee Pedro Pascal (The Last of Us) and Chinese star Tang Wei (Decision to Leave).

In the big-canvas “love letter to life,” Pugh will play Nora Seed, who finds herself in a library between life and death with the chance to experience all the potential lives she could have lived.

The novel is being adapted by Olivier Award winner Laura Wade (Rivals) and Tony nominee Nick Payne (We Live In Time). Midnight Library was first published by Canongate in 2020. Sales for it counted 15M with a translation in 56 languages.