Sony’s TriStar Pictures has acquired worldwide rights to Danny Boyle’s sequel to “Trainspotting,” with shooting starting in the late spring.
Sony made a pre-emptive bid to acquire the rights Friday.
The untitled film, based on characters created by Irvine Welsh, reunites director Danny Boyle with screenwriter John Hodge and all of the principal cast of the 1996 film. Ewan McGregor, Jonny Lee Miller, Ewen Bremner and Robert Carlyle will reprise the roles of Renton, Sick Boy, Spud and Begbie, respectively.
Producers are Andrew Macdonald, Boyle, Christian Colson, and Bernie Bellew through Figment Films, Decibel Films and Cloud Eight Films. Film4 is also a production entity.
Sony plans to release the film in 2017 to mark the 21st birthday of the original film.
“It’s been 20 years since we met these characters and John Hodge’s screenplay brilliantly explores what’s happened to them — and to us — in the intervening years,” Boyle said.
Carlyle recently told NME, “It’s one of the best scripts I’ve f—ing read.”
Based on the novel of the same name by Irvine Welsh, the Hodge screenplay received an Academy Award nomination. The story, set in the late 1980s, follows a group of heroin addicts in an economically depressed area of Edinburgh.
The film was produced for $2 million and generated a worldwide gross of more than $70 million, launching the careers of McGregor, Carlyle and Boyle.
Sony studio chief Tom Rothman has had a long partnership with Boyle via Fox Searchlight, which was founded by Rothman in 1994. That partnership included “A Life Less Ordinary,” “28 Days Later,” “127 Hours” and Academy Award Best Picture “Slumdog Millionaire.”
Welsh wrote a sequel novel called “Porno,” published in 2002 with the five main characters and Hodge wrote an original script for the project. During the recent promotional tour for “Steve Jobs,” Boyle said that he planned to shoot the movie next year.
TriStar president Hannah Minghella said she has been a longtime fan of the original film.
“Trainspotting was a seminal movie for me,” she said. “Like almost everyone my age, I had the ‘Choose Life’ poster on my university dorm room wall. I have wanted to work with Danny ever since, so the opportunity to collaborate on the sequel is truly a dream come true. It perfectly represents the filmmaker-driven movies I am committed to making at TriStar.”
