Bleecker Street has acquired U.S. rights to The Man Who Invented Christmas, a film based on Les Standiford's book "that recounts how Charles Dickens created his iconic A Christmas Carol," according to the Hollywood Reporter. The project will be directed by Bharat Nalluri (Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day) from a script by Susan Coyne (Mozart in the Jungle). The young Dickens will be played by Dan Stevens (Downton Abbey), with Christopher Plummer as Scrooge and Jonathan Pryce as Dickens's father.
Robert Mickelson and Ian Sharples are producing, with Paula Mazur, Mitchell Kaplan, Andrew Karpen and Vadim Jean executive producing. Parallel Films and Rhombus Media are co-production partners. The movie is set to begin production in December, with a planned 2017 release.
"The Man Who Invented Christmas is an emotionally rich story of Dickens' creative process and illustrates his love of the holiday spirit," said Karpen, Bleecker Street's CEO.
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Lionsgate has set Tobias Lindholm to direct his first English-language film, The Good Nurse, which is based on Charles Graeber's book The Good Nurse: A True Story of Medicine, Madness & Murder. The script is by Krysty Wilson-Cairns and Darren Aronofsky's Protozoa is producing.
Deadline reported that Lindholm "is the Danish writer-director whose 2015 film A War (Krigen), about a Danish military company captured by the Taliban in Afghanistan, was Oscar nominated for Best Foreign Language Film. His other films include the hostage drama A Hijacking, Submarino and R, and he is acclaimed for his work on the TV drama Borgen and for teaming with Thomas Vinterberg on the script for the Oscar-nominated The Hunt."