The thing about adapting “chick lit” novels into film is that already the studio knows that there’s an audience for it, which is a good thing. The tricky thing is that the audience is invariably going to be made up of some people who are not in the novel’s targeted demographic, and this audience has to be entertained as well.
Which is why I’m not surprised that Universal Pictures and Spyglass Entertainment have finally settled on director Andy Fickman (The Game Plan, You Again) to lead its adaptation of Sophie Kinsella’s The Undomestic Goddess.
According to The Hollywood Reporter, Fickman will be reporting to both Spyglass and Tribeca Productions, working from a script by Aline Brosh McKenna (The Devil Wears Prada).
Goddess is the story of a workaholic London attorney named Samantha Sweeting who suffers a brief mental episode at work after making a costly error and escapes to the English countryside. There, she is mistaken for a candidate for a maid position at a country estate and decides to just go with it rather than facing her problems back in the big city. The production will keep the setting the same, but it sounds to me like they’re going to turn Sweeting into an American, which irks me only a little.
To say that Fickman’s recent films haven’t been good is definitely a matter of opinion as even though The Game Plan only scored a 27% on the Tomatometer, it ranked #1 in box office sales for its opening weekend in September 2007 and has a total worldwide gross of $147 million. It was also the top DVD rental for three weeks in a row upon its release in January 2008.
It doesn’t hurt that he’ll have McKenna’s adaptation to work from and the fact that Sweeting is a more empathic character than the one in Kinsella’s Confessions of a Shopaholic may also help the film’s chances.
Ultimately, I think the success of this film is going to be based entirely on whom they get to play the leads and how many great character actors they can get to fulfill the supporting roles. This could almost be a job for Amy Adams, but I doubt she’d want to do another romantic comedy so soon after Leap Year only made it to #6 on its opening weekend.