As confirmed by our partners over at Coming Soon, notorious director Zack Snyer (Sucker Punch, Legend of the Guardians: The Owls of Ga’Hoole, the upcoming Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice) has his sights officially set on adapting Ayn Rand’s novel The Fountainhead to the big screen. In Snyder’s own words:
“I have been working on The Fountainhead, I’ve always felt like The Fountainhead was such a thesis on the creative process and what it is to create something. Warner Bros. owns [Ayn Rand’s] script and I’ve just been working on that a little bit.”
Check Out: Our Review of Atlas Shrugged Part II
If this does indeed come to fruition, it will be the second time The Fountainhead has been made into a feature film, following the 1949 version starring Gary Cooper and Patricia Neal, which notoriously flopped and which Ayn Rand personally hated. The novel follows an architect named Howard Roark who believes his designs are the greatest to date, and who experiences a lot of push-back from an establishment that refuses to acknowledge his brilliance. He begins designing anonymously as a result. Like all of Rand’s work, it focuses on human exceptionalism, objectivism, and the evils of collectivism.
Snyder is fighting an uphill battle. The three previous attempts to bring an earnest version of Ayn Rand to the big screen resulted in a scattered and cheap trilogy of Atlas Shrugged features that were critically panned and made very little money. The series was so unsuccessful that the producer required a Kickstarter campaign to complete the third film, which is very much counter to the Do-It-All-Yourself-and-Screw-Everyone-Else philosophies espoused by Rand.
Libertarians are a small but increasingly vocal political group in this country, and Ayn Rand has re-entered the cultural conversation in recent years, largely thanks to the notorious Atlas Shrugged movies. We shall see if Snyder is seen to do the work justice or not.
Top Image: Warner Bros.
Witney Seibold is a contributor to the CraveOnline Film Channel, and the co-host of The B-Movies Podcast. He also contributes to Legion of Leia and to Blumhouse. You can follow him on “The Twitter” at@WitneySeibold, where he is slowly losing his mind.
