Considering how things went with daddy Will on After Earth last year, it's probably no surprise Jaden Smith is getting a little bit of distance. He's already confirmed to rejoin Jackie Chan for a sequel to The Karate Kid, and now he'll be teaming up with Liev Schreiber for an adaptation of James McBride's award-winning novel, The Good Lord Bird.
McBride, whose book Miracle at St. Anna was adapted by Spike Lee in 2008, will produce the film which follows "Henry “Onion” Shackleford (Smith), a young slave who links up with radical abolitionist John Brown (Schreiber) in 1856 Kansas and travels the nation with Brown’s motley crew of freedom fighters. Story is told with a satirical bent through the eyes of Onion, who wears a dress and is at first mistaken for a girl, as he bears witness to Brown’s historic campaign and encounters the likes of Frederick Douglass and Harriet Tubman en route to the bloody Harper’s Ferry raid that helped spark the Civil War."
McBride also co-wrote Spike Lee's Red Hook Summer, and it'll be interesting to see if Lee gets involved with this, too. The material is definitely in his wheelhouse. Expect studios to jump on this one, especially after the Oscar-winning success of 12 Years A Slave. [Deadline]
