With 137 million dollars in worldwide receipts for a budget of 90 million,
Death on the Nile, the
second adventure of Hercule Poirot embodied and directed by Kenneth Branagh, was a flop.
But to everyone's surprise, Disney revealed on Tuesday that it had commissioned the British director and William Shakespeare specialist to make a third film inspired by Agatha Christie's investigations.
The feature film is called for the moment:
A Haunting in Venice
.
Which could be translated as “a ghostly apparition in Venice”.
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This time, Kenneth Branagh will have a greater freedom of tone than with the classics
Murder on the Orient-Express
and
Death on the Nile.
He got, with his screenwriter Michael Green (
Logan
), to transpose a less known investigation of the queen of crime:
The Halloween crime
(also known as
The Pumpkin Festival
).
Kenneth Branagh has obtained permission from the rights holders to move the plot from a village in the South of England to the City of the Doges.
Published in 1969, the novel featured Joyce, an 11-year-old girl who brags at Halloween festivities that she has witnessed a real murder.
After a day of games, his corpse is discovered.
Hercule Poirot is called on the spot by a novelist friend, who took part in the festivities.
A Haunting in Venice
promises from the synopsis to move away from it.
“In the stricken Venice of the post-war period, on the eve of All Saints, a terrifying mystery will mark the return of Hercule Poirot to center stage.
In voluntary exile in the Serenissima, Poirot, now retired, reluctantly attends a seance in a disused and supposedly haunted palazzo.
When one of the guests is murdered, the famous detective finds himself propelled into a sinister world filled with shadows and secrets..."
, depicts the press release.
Reunion with the actors of his previous film
Belfast
Kenneth Branagh assures him:
“This is a fantastic development of the character of Hercule Poirot, just as much as the work of Agatha Christie.
Based on a rather unknown complex story set during Halloween in a most photogenic city,
A Haunting In Venice
is a great opportunity for us, the production team, to be able to concoct something for our loyal viewers that will really send shivers down their spines.
".
As for his first two adaptations, where Johnny Depp, Olivia Colman, Gal Gadot and the disgraced Armie Hammer appeared, the Briton brings together a host of stars: Tina Fey
(30 Rocks
), Michelle Yeoh (
Tiger and Dragon
), the French actress Camille Cottin (
Ten percent
), Jamie Dorman (
Fifty Shades Of Grey).
Jamie Dorman and Kenneth Branagh had previously worked together in beautiful
Belfast
, an account of the filmmaker's childhood in the city torn apart by the Troubles between Republican Catholics and Northern Irish Protestant Unionists in the late 1960s.
Kenneth Branagh also takes the little boy who played him in
Belfast
into the City of the Doges .
Cherub Jude Hill will likely play the young victim.
The filming will be divided between the London studios of Pinewood and the beautiful landscapes and monuments of Venice (
Where Death on the Nile
had filmed its desert and its Egyptian pyramids on a green screen).
The filming of
A Haunting In Venice
will begin on October 31, Halloween day for a theatrical release in 2023.