Richard Linklater Is Going to Spend 20 Entire Years Adapting Merrily We Roll Along

After spending 12 years to make Boyhood, Richard Linklater has announced that he will spend two full decades adapting the Stephen Sondheim musical Merrily We Roll Along, which is set from 1957 to 1976 and follows the life of a Broadway composer who’s gone Hollywood. I don’t understand, but I do respect it.

Via the Guardian:

Beanie Feldstein and Ben Platt – longtime best friends with a pronounced love of Broadway musicals – are set to star, alongside Blake Jenner. The show starts at the height of its hero’s success, then rewinds to when he was a struggling youngster.

“I first saw and fell in love with Merrily in the 80s and I can’t think of a better place to spend the next 20 years than in the world of a Sondheim musical,” said Linklater. “I don’t enter this multi-year experience lightly, but it seems the best, perhaps the only way, to do this story justice on film.”

Sounds great, can’t wait to have it beamed directly into my brain sitting around the shattered wreckage of civilization circa 2039.