Wes Anderson’s is mak­ing an oth­er Roald Dahl adap­ta­tion for Netflix

It would appear that Wes Ander­son has offi­cial­ly entered his work­horse phase. His lat­est film The French Dis­patch got its long-await­ed the­atri­cal release only a few short months ago, and reports say that he’s already wrapped pho­tog­ra­phy on his fol­low-up, the Spain-set and star-stud­ded Aster­oid City. But it’s not like he’s going to take that as cause for a break.

With his next film still ges­tat­ing, Ander­son has already begun pro­duc­tion on his next next film, announced by jour­nal­ist Baz Bamigboye just last night as an adap­ta­tion of Roald Dahl’s 1977 short com­po­si­tion The Won­der­ful Sto­ry of Hen­ry Sug­ar. What’s more, this lat­est fea­ture will match Ander­son with an unex­pect­ed pair of col­lab­o­ra­tors new to his cozy lit­tle uni­verse – Bene­dict Cum­ber­batch has signed on to lead the film, which will be pro­duced and dis­trib­uted by Netflix.

In Dahl’s orig­i­nal text, the char­ac­ter of Hen­ry Sug­ar was a man who suc­cess­ful­ly trained him­self to see with his eyes closed, a skill that he then used to cheat and win at cards. (Curi­ous­ly enough, the same broad-strokes plot as Fritz Lang​’s silent clas­sic Dr Mabuse the Gam­bler, a con­nec­tion that Ander­son can sure­ly be count­ed on to have already made.) Of course, these uneth­i­cal choic­es even­tu­al­ly come back around to Hen­ry, and he finds that ​“more than his eyes have been changed by his stud­ies,” as the offi­cial syn­op­sis details.

Of course, this isn’t Anderson’s first dal­liance with the prose of Roald Dahl, hav­ing already brought his Fan­tas­tic Mr Fox to the screen back in 2009. Like that film, we can safe­ly pre­sume that Anderson’s newest will play to the whole fam­i­ly while incor­po­rat­ing traces of the matur­er themes and motifs – inse­cu­ri­ty, dead­beat dads, makeshift fam­i­ly units heal­ing the emo­tion­al wounds they leave behind – for which his work is known.

Cum­ber­batch should fit in nice­ly with Anderson’s dead­pan ver­bosi­ty, but it’ll be inter­est­ing to see if and how hitch­ing his wag­on to Net­flix might have an effect on Anderson’s film­mak­ing. How could some­one so com­mit­ted to the bandy­ing-about of aspect ratios pos­si­bly get along with the world’s biggest stream­ing plat­form? Though hey, if Scors­ese could make it work, sure­ly they’ll fig­ure some­thing out.