So, about Matt Reeves and David E. Kelley’s ‘Bonfire of the Vanities’ — Apple TV has backed away from it, according to Deadline. The project is now orphaned and looking for a new home.
Reeves is supposed to direct the episodes, Kelley write them, and just like that, Apple got cold feet — the usual “creative differences” excuse is being cited in the report, and maybe that was indeed the case.
So, after decades of being treated like radioactive IP in Hollywood, “The Bonfire of the Vanities” continues to struggle. Maybe it’ll find a new home, maybe it won’t — the project is in flux.
On paper, if there was ever a story that screamed “limited series,” it’s Wolfe’s sprawling, acidic dissection of 1980s New York — Wall Street, greed, media hysteria, racial tension, all revolving around bond trader Sherman McCoy. A limited series format could give all of this room to breathe — to actually explore the worlds of finance, politics, media, and the justice system without flattening everything into a two-hour compromise.
The book, first serialized in Rolling Stone in 1984 before its 1987 publication, is dense, character-driven, and unapologetically mean.
Of course, there’s a cautionary tale here. Brian De Palma’s 1990 adaptation remains one of the great disasters in studio filmmaking — a glossy, wildly misjudged take that stripped Wolfe’s satire down to something oddly toothless. It was miscast. Tom Hanks as McCoy? Not right. Bruce Willis and Melanie Griffith didn’t know what movie they were in. Worse, studio interference occurred.
That is why nobody’s really touched this IP in 35 years. It seems like Apple is just the latest to have learned that lesson.
Sam Neill had filmed four projects back-to-back over the past year, all of which would be released in the coming months, including “The Legend of Zelda.”