Most years, when the Hollywood Blacklist of "most-liked" unproduced scripts comes out in December I scan the titles to see if any of the taglines suggest that they could star Meryl. Not many do, but usually I can find one that seems plausible, at least from the one to two sentence description. I can remember reading a version of Nyad a decade ago and imagining Meryl taking on that role. Then of course there was The Post, which only a few months after being on the Blacklist was in production with Meryl and released later that year.
One script from this year's list caught my eye. I'll be honest I didn't read every single tagline because after the first twenty or so how good is the script really expected to be? But Joe Ferran's Leverage, with 23 mentions (which had it tied for seventh with number-one having 46 mentions) made me wonder if the main character referenced could be of an age suitable for Meryl:
After a high-profile murder threatens a multi-billion dollar hostile takeover, an embattled Wall Street titan emerges as the prime suspect and must win a war of perception in order to protect her empire at all costs.
Age (and gender of course) are two high hurdles these days for scripts that might suit Meryl. An "embattled Wall Street titan" doesn't exactly strike me as someone in their thirties or forties. I like the idea of it maybe being a bit of a thriller or perhaps a bit political. I also like that the main character is a suspect for murder. It's an interesting twist that I don't think we've seen Meryl navigate. I wonder a little bit if it's a little too close to a Miranda Priestly-like ball busting role, but I imagine that it wouldn't have to be.
I happened to notice that there were a handful of scripts that seemed to center on billionaires. None of them suggest a particularly flattering depiction of said characters, not that they're historically considered pillars of high moral standards. But I wonder if it's a bit of the sign of the times, with the current occupant of our White House and the "affordability" crisis looming so largely in people's minds, the stories in these scripts may showcase these ever-increasing large gaps in wealth among the American electorate.
Speaking of corruption and stories of rich magnates, there was
news yesterday of Sigourney Weaver being in talks to join Amazon's live-action
Tomb Raider series. It's apparently got a filming start date of January 19. A commenter on Word on the Streep suggested that with Weaver joining this project that
Useful Idiots is to be either postponed or scrapped completely. While that could certainly be the case, I'm not sure this news automatically indicates that 1) Weaver has dropped out of
Useful Idiots, 2) she couldn't film both in a short period of time, particularly if one or both of her roles are relatively small, and 3)
Useful Idiots is doomed. Weaver had said in a recent interview that she was filming the movie with Meryl in early 2026. The trades recently confirmed it, and it's got a solid director attached. It seemed so prime for production, but it's easy to remember how the news for
The Great Lillian Hall (originally entitled
Places, Please) was announced in February 2021, with an expected filming start slated for that summer. Of course Meryl never starred in that film, and it lay dormant for two years before Jessica Lange took over the role and it moved to TV for a spring '24 release.
I sure hope it still happens! But now my pessimistic brain has me worried. What do you guys think?
