Ever since he stepped away from the Footloose adaptation, High School Musical graduate Zac Efron hasn’t been on my radar much because I’m a grown woman whose fictional crushes aren’t on guys who are 10 years younger than I am (mostly). However, the news of what Efron has decided his first self-produced movie will be has got me very intrigued.
From The Hollywood Reporter‘s Heat Vision blog comes the exclusive news that Warner Bros. picked up the rights to the remake of a Swedish film called Snabba cash—which translates into “easy money”—as a vehicle for Efron and the production house he’s gotten set up with them. Based on the original novel by Jens Lapidus, Efron would play Johan Westlund, a young financial wiz who looks to maintain his free-wheeling lifestyle by becoming a drug runner for a coke dealer.
The best part of this deal can be found here:
The deal, in the high six figures, has a progress to production, or “short fuse” clause, which means that if Warners sits on it for too long, the rights revert back to the producers.
I can only imagine how great that would feel for someone who’s selling their remake rights to know that if they take too long to do something with your property, you’ll get the rights back sooner rather than later.
Unlike the bloggers at the L.A. Times, I’m not convinced that the quick pick-up of Snabba‘s remake rights is a harbinger of a slew of Swedish crime films waiting to wing their way over to the states. I am then quickly reminded of the fact that after The Ring hit the U.S. shores like a tsunami, studios rushed to remake and/or re-release scores of Japanese horror films because they were just that different enough from what we’ve seen to be new (to us) again.
Still, there are worse genres to be transferred from other countries to ours.