More people needed to check out Drew Barrymore’s Whip It. Her underrated 2009 directorial debut was a spunky and well-crafted piece of grrrrly-girl empowerment that fit lead Ellen Page like a glove (or a roller skate) and proved Barrymore has chops behind the camera. Now she’s getting a second chance to lure a larger audience by tackling a feature-film adaptation of Ally Carter’s teen mystery novel Heist Society.
Barrymore will produce and direct the picture for Warner Bros., which won a multi-studio bidding war for the novel’s rights last year, according to The Hollywood Reporter. She also has tasked Whip It screenwriter Shauna Cross to adapt the story and age Carter’s teenage characters a few years to morph them from teenagers to early twentysomethings.
The main character in Carter’s book is Katarina “Kat” Bishop, the daughter of a master criminal who springs into action when her father is accused of boosting five paintings he actually didn’t steal. When Kat unearths the paintings in Paris, she assembles a team of like-minded teen thieves to retrieve them and clear her father’s name.
By aging the characters outside of their teen years, this could mean Barrymore plans on reuniting with Whip It lead Page, who certainly learned how to infiltrate dreams as part of Christopher Nolan’s Inception. As for Carter, it will be interesting to see if her audience follows Heist to theaters, as it is one of the first books she penned outside of her best-selling, young adult Gallagher Girls literary series. If they do support Barrymore’s film, Carter wrote a “sequel” with Kat called Uncommon Criminals that just hit shelves on June 21. Maybe Warner should snap up the rights, while there’s time?
