EXCLUSIVE: Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa, the playwright and comic book writer who was brought on to rewrite and hopefully save Broadway’s Spider-Man: Turn Off The Dark, has booked several projects to follow. On the TV side, he’ll become a co-producer and writer of the hit series Glee. And I’m told that he’s just been set by MGM and Screen Gems to write a remake of Carrie, the Stephen King thriller about the telekinetic teenager who gets pushed too far at the prom and wreaks havoc on her fellow high school students. King’s bestselling book was turned into the 1976 film that starred Sissy Spacek, John Travolta, Amy Irving and Piper Laurie as the repressive mother.
For Aguirre-Sacasa, these diverse projects are right in his wheelhouse. On Carrie, he will write a version that is more faithful to the King book than the earlier movie, much the same as Joel and Ethan Coen went back to the Charles Portis novel True Grit to present a version that didn’t really feel like a remake. Aguirre-Sacasa has a relationship with the author, after writing the graphic novel version of King’s The Stand, King’s seminal apocalyptic novel.
Aguirre-Sacasa was certainly an inspired choice to come aboard and try to fix the mess that was Spider-Man. He wrote the book to the Charles Strouse/Lee Adams musical It’s A Plane, It’s SUPERMAN! that was a hit at the Dallas Theatre Center, and he has also written Spider-Man comics for Marvel along with such titles as American Nightmares. The WME-repped scribe also wrote on the HBO series Big Love. We’ll know how well Aguirre-Sacasa did when Spider-Man opens on Broadway on June 14.
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