It may feel alienating for viewers more familiar with traditional Shakespeare, but say what you like about it, it’s word-perfect to the original text. One of Luhrmann’s slyest moves is introducing his key cast with freeze-frames and titles, welcoming a younger audience via soap opera stylings.
The famous prologue is now read by a news anchor and the frenetic montage that accompanies it resembles a trailer more than anything else, surely the perfect modern equivalent to a theatrical prologue. It may seem unfaithful to the original text, but Luhrmann actually updates the play with some clever touches.
It’s a vision never before seen in Shakespeare and one of the most thrilling opening sequences of all-time. An operatic chorus rises above the chaos as scenes of police brutality and riots flashes across the screen.
It begins with a psychedelic crash zoom into the face of a pseudo-Christ the Redeemer statue, planted between two skyscrapers in the fictional LA-esque city of Verona. It’s safe to say that Romeo + Juliet offered a much-needed change of pace. Orson Welles’ 1952 version of ‘Othello’ was so faithful to Shakespeare’s original staging that he even played the lead role himself, rather than cast a black actor. Most, like Franco Zeffirelli’s 1968 Romeo and Juliet or Kenneth Branagh’s Henry V, stayed true to the period, with a production and set design that could best be described as authentic. Reps for the actor tell Vanity Fair that Stanfield is still attached.Before Baz Luhrmann blew our minds with his incendiary take on the star-crossed lovers back in 1996, the template for Shakespeare adaptations was fairly uninspired. Per Deadline, the script for Lee’s adaptation will be cowritten by Hinds, Lee, and Wimberly. A script was penned by former editor in chief of the Source Selwyn Seyfu Hinds ( The Twilight Zone). There were rumblings in 2018 that Legendary was putting together an adaptation of Prince of Cats as a star vehicle for none other than Lakeith Stanfield, a perfect bit of casting. It would be illegal for Lee to consider not making this movie, no? The story, based on Ron Wimberly’s graphic novel, shifts the narrative to Tybalt’s perspective, following Juliet’s furious cousin as he sword-fights his sworn enemies, the Montagues. Per Deadline, the director has signed on to helm an adaptation of Prince of Cats, a hip-hop version of Shakespeare’s Romeo & Juliet set in 1980s-era New York. The Oscar-winning filmmaker, who picked up his first Academy Award earlier this year for best adapted screenplay for BlacKkKlansman, has lined up a project that seems all but made for him, and returns him to the milieu that defined his career with 1989’s Do the Right Thing.
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