Austin Butler to Play Patrick Bateman in ‘American Psycho' Reboot

It’s finally Austin Butler who will play Patrick Bateman in Luca Guadagnino’s “American Psycho” reboot. Here’s Variety tackling our previous Jacob Elordi rumor:

While there had been rumors that Jacob Elordi was being eyed to play Patrick Bateman, that casting didn’t come to pass. Elordi and Butler have something in common, having both played very different versions of Elvis in movies by Sofia Coppola (“Priscilla”) and Baz Luhrmann (“Elvis”), respectively.

Butler is interesting casting. I would have rather wanted Elordi to play Bateman, but Butler being in there instead isn’t necessarily a bad thing. We’ll see how it all shakes up as this seems to be fairly different tackling of Bateman than the 2000 film.

As mentioned before, the film, which features a script by Scott Z. Burns, will not be a remake of the 2000 film, but rather a new take on Bret Easton Ellis’ novel, one that will have a larger emphasis on the novel’s erotica rather than the horror satire of the original.

While Butler is attached to play the lead role in the movie, Guadagnino might have interpreted Patrick Bateman in a much different way than its previous incarnation, according to Variety. There is also the possibility that this latest take will be set in the 21st century rather than the ‘80s.

The reboot will follow on Mary Harron’s 2000 film, based on Ellis’ novel, which starred a never-better Christian Bale as 1980s Wall Street sociopath Patrick Bateman. The book’s anti-hero, Bateman, a work and character of pure transgressive art, warned us about consumer culture.

The sexism was the point, which further delved into the shallow and vicious aspects of materialism and superficiality. It predicted the postmodern world in which, as literary critic Jeffrey W. Hunter so well put it, the “surface” would reign supreme.

No word yet on whether this will be Guadagnino’s next film as he currently also has “Separate Rooms,” and “Sgt. Rock” in sped-fast development.