According to Variety, Fox Searchlight picked up the rights to Nice, a quirky little novel by Jen Sacks that was a huge hit for her in 1998, and are looking at Reese Witherspoon to star.
Originally, these rights had been at Warner Bros. and the movie was being developed as a vehicle for Helen Hunt, but it never got its act together—because the romantic comedy-style plot revolves around a female serial killer.
Sure, the blurb from Publisher’s Weekly completely glosses over the fact that the main character is a 30-year old woman who kills a boyfriend rather than break up with him, which turns into a “Meet Cute” when she gets some help from a former KGB assassin when trying to get rid of the body. And that she continues to kill boyfriends she can’t get rid of because she’s too nice to hurt their feelings when she dumps them.
I have very mixed feelings about this movie prospect. I recall famously vowing never wanting anything to do with The Devil Wears Prada because I hated the main character on the very first page of the book. (Note: Any woman who does not know how to drive a stick-shift car through Manhattan while smoking a cigarette isn’t my kind of woman.) However, even after two years, the movie intrigues me the more I read about it and I’m probably going to end up renting or borrowing it somewhere down the line.
I guess that if Fox Searchlight manages to be able to keep the dark tone of the novel along with the comedy, it’ll be okay; it’s all up to picking the right screenwriter, it seems.