Danny Boyle’s dream of reprising his career-defining 1996 drug-addled crime drama Trainspotting will come to fruition in 2017. According to The Hollywood Reporter, Sony’s TriStar Studio is signing on to make it happen, along with the film’s original stars; Ewan McGregor, Jonny Lee Miller, Ewen Bremner, and Robert Carlyle will be reprising their roles. John Hodge, who adapted Irvine Welsh’s 1993 novel of the same name for the first film, is writing the screenplay for the sequel.
“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,” said Boyle in a statement.
The Oscar-nominated film, which told the story of low-income heroin users in Edinburgh, Scotland aimlessly traipsing through their lives, was one of the most renowned films of the ’90s. It is ranked 155th on IMDb’s Top Ranked Movies Chart. Rolling Stone’s Peter Travers called it “90 minutes of raw power that Boyle and a bang-on cast inject right into the vein.” Entertainment Weekly compared Boyle’s directing in Trainspotting to that of legendary directors Scorsese and Tarantino. It was ranked the tenth best film of all time by the British Film Institute.
Sony Pictures co-chair Tom Rothman has indirectly worked with Boyle in the past, as The Hollywood Reporter points out. Boyle released 28 Days Later, Slumdog Millionaire, and 127 Hours through Fox Searchlight while Rothman was CEO of the studio.
TriStar president Hannah Minghella is a longtime fan of the film. “Like almost everyone my age, I had the Choose Life poster on my university dorm-room wall,” said Minghella in a statement. “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.”
The follow-up to Trainspotting, which doesn’t have an official title yet, will begin filming in the spring.
