Room’s Lenny Abrahamson to direct World War I tale The Grand Escape

Last Updated on July 31, 2021

THR is reporting that ROOM and FRANK director Lenny Abrahamson is attached to helm an adaption of the upcoming Neal Bascomb novel The Grand Escape. This will likely be Abrahamson's next movie, but Bascomb hasn't finished the book yet and the project currently doesn't have a writer, so it could be a while before it heads into production.

According to the site, "Grand Escape is the true story of three daredevil World War I pilots being held in Germany's most infamous POW prison. The story chronicles WWI's greatest mass prison escape, and the pilots' subsequent flight to freedom." The WWI tale was previously told on the big screen in the 1938 British war movie WHO GOES NEXT?, and it was also the subject of the 2014 National Geographic documentary The First Great Escape.

Film4 and Element Pictures recently acquired the rights to the yet-to-be-published book, which doesn't have a release date yet, however Bascomb's next novel, The Winter Fortress, will hit shelves this May.