By Matt Grobar
December 5, 2024 1:00pm
EXCLUSIVE: Black Label Media has acquired film rights to The Strange, the 2023 sci-fi thriller novel by Nathan Ballingrud, enlisting Aisha Porter-Christie (Amazon MGM’s Citizen) to adapt the screenplay and J.D. Dillard (Devotion) to direct.
The project reunites Dillard with Black Label Media on the heels of Devotion, his historical war epic for Columbia Pictures, which the company produced.
The Strange is set in New Galveston, Mars in the year 1931. In the desolate frontier of a Martian colony, 14-year-old Anabelle Crisp embarks on a perilous quest through the desert, vowing revenge on the man who doomed her father to the gallows and stole her prized possession — the last known recording of her mother’s voice. The book is said to evoke the gritty, lawless atmosphere of True Grit combined with the raw intensity of Mad Max, following a young girl’s relentless search for justice as she battles ruthless outlaws and haunting mysteries on the rugged, untamed Martian landscape.
Black Label Media’s Molly Smith, Rachel Smith, Thad Luckinbill and Trent Luckinbill will produce along with Dillard and David Eisenberg, with Black Label also financing.
Dillard is best known for directing the aforementioned Devotion, starring Jonathan Majors and Glen Powell, for which he was honored with the Rising Star Director Award at the 2022 SCAD Savannah Film Festival. Currently, he’s preparing to direct the pilot for Neuromancer, Apple’s series based on the seminal sci-fi novel from William Gibson, of which he’s also co-creator and executive producer. Previously, Dillard also helmed a pair of Sundance films: the micro-budget crime drama Sleight, starring Jacob Latimore, Seychelle Gabriel and Storm Reid, which marked his directorial debut and sparked a bidding war at the festival, and the survival horror pic Sweetheart, starring Kiersey Clemons.
Porter-Christie is currently attached as co-showrunner of Citizen, an original series from Derek Kolstad, for Amazon MGM Studios. She previously served as a consulting producer on Marvel’s Daredevil and as Co-EP on Amazon’s Gen V.
Ballingrud’s novella The Visible Filth was adapted into the Babak Anvari film Wounds, which premiered at Sundance and was released by Annapurna Pictures. Most recently putting out the novella Crypt of the Moon Spider, his other works include North American Lake Monsters and Wounds: Six Stories from the Border of Hell.
