Luca Guadagnino-Directed Adaptation Of ‘Queer’ With Daniel Craig In Works

Luca Guadagnino has been looking to mount a feature take of the William S. Burroughs novel Queer with Daniel Craig in the lead as his next project. The Call Me By Your Name Oscar nominee is the process of raising financing for the project.

Queer follows Lee, who recounts his life in Mexico City among American expatriate college students and bar owners surviving on part-time jobs and GI Bill benefits. Lee is self-conscious, insecure and driven to pursue a young man named Allerton, who is based on Adelbert Lewis Marker (1930-1998), a recently discharged American Navy serviceman from Jacksonville, FL, who befriended Burroughs in Mexico City. The novel is a sequel to Burroughs’ Junkie and centers on the Naked Lunch author off of heroin. Queer was published in 1985 through written between 1951 and 1953.

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We’ve known about this for a while. Guadagnino might have an Oscar contender in Bones and All, which was picked up by MGM. That reteam with Timothée Chalamet, a cannibal love story, didn’t really resonate at the Thanksgiving box office given its grim theme, grossing only $11M worldwide, but it took prizes at Venice Film Festival for Best Director and Taylor Russell as Best Young Actress.

The filmmaker, like Steven Spielberg, always is known to be developing a number of projects at the same time. He also has in early works an Audrey Hepburn biopic with Rooney Mara attached. However, the Apple project is still in need of a scribe, we understand.

Craig returned to the Rian Johnson-directed Knives Out franchise this fall with Glass Onionwhich was the best of the new adult-targeted films with a first-week gross of $15M. The pic only played one week in theaters as a special Netflix sneak preview, which included the top three circuits AMC, Regal and Cinemark in a first for the streamer. The pic hits Netflix on December 23. Craig made his finale as 007 in No Time to Die last fall, which grossed over $774M global.

Rosy Cordero contributed to this report.