“Friday Night Lights” in all its forms — Buzz Bissinger’s book, the Billy Bob Thornton movie and then the TV show — was pretty compelling stuff (except for that one season when Landry killed a dude to protect Tyra and then everyone kind of forgot about it after a few episodes). Knowing that, and knowing Hollywood’s mania for rebooting anything that was remotely successful, the news that “Friday Night Lights” will be getting new life as a motion picture is hardly a surprise.
Variety reported Wednesday that director David Gordon Green (“Stronger,” “Pineapple Express”) is in final negotiations to direct the “Friday Night Lights” reboot movie for Universal. It won’t be a sequel to either the Thornton film or the TV show, though the studio apparently has considered both of those options. Instead, the film will bring in completely new characters in “a completely different setting,” Variety’s Justin Kroll writes, though it apparently will still revolve around high school football in Texas. Robert Schenkkan, who won a Pulitzer for writing one play (“The Kentucky Cycle”) and a Tony for another (“All the Way”), already has written the screenplay and said production will begin in a few months:
Bissinger’s book was a work of nonfiction that came out in 1990, so there have been plenty of football developments since then to mine for plot points: awareness of head injuries, players taking activist stances, etc. What has not changed is the popularity and impact of high school football in Texas. As of last year, there were 74 high school football stadiums in the state that seated at least 10,000 fans, and 17 percent of all of Texas’s stadiums had video scoreboards.
And it’s not like Hollywood hasn’t already taken liberties with the source material, either. The Thornton movie was a lightly fictionalized retelling of Bissinger’s book, and the television show introduced a completely new cast of characters and set them in the modern day. Both turned out pretty well (again, except for Landry straight-up murdering a guy; that was bad).
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