Nic Pizzolatto got his career as a storyteller started by writing short stories and a novel called Galveston, then made his move into television by writing a couple episodes of the first season of the AMC series The Killing. He wasn’t pleased with that experience, telling NOLA.com that, “I want to be the guiding vision. I don’t do well serving someone else’s vision.” So he left The Killing as it headed into season 2 and went off to create his own show: True Detective, which found a home at HBO. Pizzolatto’s deal with HBO was renewed twice over the years as he crafted three seasons of True Detective, with his final deal with the network earning him $3 million a year. He was going to work on the network’s Perry Mason reboot, but had to let it go so he could focus on True Detective. Once True Detective season 3 wrapped up, Pizzolatto’s HBO deal expired and he signed a new deal with FX… but while Pizzolatto was gone, HBO retained the ownership rights to True Detective, and they were interested in bringing in someone who had “a fresh voice with a different point of view” to oversee a new season of the show. That’s how we see Issa López’s True Detective: Night Country – and now only has Pizzolatto’s social media behavior made it clear that he’s not happy to see True Detective continue without him, it has also led fans to wonder what he’s up to these days. So The Hollywood Reporter has put together an article on what Pizzolatto has been doing since his True Detective days ended.
First came the series he set up at FX: a drama called Redeemer, based on the Patrick Coleman novel The Churchgoer, which was set to star True Detective season 1’s Matthew McConaughey. FX gave the project a “script to series commitment”, meaning it would get a straight-to-series order, bypassing the pilot stage, if the network liked the scripts Pizzolatto turned in. Unfortunately, this project was set up in January of 2020, so it came to a standstill during the first year of the pandemic. At the start of 2021, FX decided to pass on Redeemer, and Pizzolatto negotiated an early exit from his FX deal, two years before it would have expired.
During the True Detective years, Pizzolatto had also worked on the scripts for the 2016 remake of The Magnificent Seven, an adaptation of his novel Galveston (which he took his name off of when director Mélanie Laurent did her own rewrite of the script), an unmade World War II drama called Ghost Army (which had Ben Affleck attached to direct and star), and Deadwood: The Movie. While Redeemer was falling apart, he wrote another movie, the Netflix release The Guilty (a remake of a Danish film).
In 2023, it was announced that Pizzolatto had set up “an untitled Western TV series” at Amazon’s Prime Video, again securing a “script to series” commitment… and soon after, Amazon got him to refashion his initial idea into another take on The Magnificent Seven. That project was just getting off the ground when Pizzolatto was hired to write a new draft of the Marvel Comics adaptation Blade, which is set to star his True Detective season 3 lead Mahershala Ali – but his work on that project was cut short when the writers strike hit. Once the strike was over, Marvel set aside Pizzolatto’s version of the story and decided to hire Logan‘s Michael Green to rewrite the screenplay instead.
But Pizzolatto is doing fine without Blade, because Amazon confirmed to The Hollywood Reporter that his Magnificent Seven series is still in development. He has also written “a feature film that has attracted a top-name star and director that should be announced this month, and is working on two other TV projects.”
And in just a couple months, he will be making his feature film directorial debut, as production on his film Easy’s Waltz is scheduled to begin in April. Pizzolatto will be directing the film from his own screenplay, with Al Pacino, Michelle Monaghan, Simon Rex, and True Detective season 2’s Vince Vaughn signed on to star. Easy’s Waltz has been described as “Swingers meets A Star Is Born” and will tell the story of a down-on-his-luck comedian-crooner navigating modern Las Vegas with old-school Vegas personalities.
So Pizzolatto has plenty going on, but also takes time to let people know he’s not happy that True Detective is in the hands of others now… which is kind of ironic, coming from someone who has worked on multiple remakes.
Are you a fan of Nic Pizzolatto’s work, and are you looking forward to Easy’s Waltz and/or his Magnificent Seven series (and whatever else he has in development)? Let us know by leaving a comment below.